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Zach Linge

Branches

from NER 41.1 (2020)
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And suddenly, expectedly, mothers started 
to reach their arms, fists to elbows, down 
their children’s mouths and throats, into 
the sugar-laden lining of the stomach. 
Fathers did, too; 
husbands their wives’
their husbands’ throats; sisters their brothers’ 
their mothers’; and my brothers even reached 
into a man on the street with a paper crane. 
We’d been told we would find some new 
pleasure
there. We had a notion the insides held answers 
to all our untenable questions. A teenager might 
go missing for days, so her mother would plunge 
down the tongues 
of the kid’s friends; the missing 
girl’s sister, alone in a bedroom, would choke 
on her own crackling elbows, grasping for what 
she might have forgotten.
Each time an arm
was pulled out of a mouth, it came coated: 
In short, once inside, the limb made a cast 
like a silicone mold 
of whatever it touched:
Impressions like pink dish-washing gloves 
made of blood, guts, and dinner
drew out 
of the head like a yawn: The coating sloughed 
whole off the arm, intact, peeled off as a swim 
cap, thick as wax, and wriggling 
    with rubbery veins. 
People would squeeze off these casts and leave 
them, indiscriminately, anywhere. 
They called 
these the branch of an arm for their likenesses 
to roots, to the trunks of young trees. Streets 
were littered with branches. 
    In living rooms 
people made shelves of the things. Having 
been asked through the stomach 
for answers
I myself grew a crop of unreachable questions. 
I phoned Mother, told her I’d be coming home 
soon 
              then got ahold of her spleen and found 
nothing. I left her with those first little branches
dripping, inspected, and thrown on the eaves. 
I branched out to others: my sister
    whose roof 
in Houston thatched casts of her, her husband’s
her little boys’ innards; 
        sequences of strangers 
whose bare-naked knees ground my rug to its stitches 
who entered through any obtainable hole
  dropped 
into me for answers and left empty-handed
the veins on their fingers in the cracks of my grin. 
I reached out to the preacher but found only wafers 
and prison-grade beef. 
        I littered the drippings 
of politicians and recycled a stack of historians’ 
suppers. 
Of late, I’ve been thinking around 
the question of my sensitive lover’s insides. 
I haven’t reached often
though I wouldn’t say 
never (his fifth and sixth kidneys are swinging 
on cords over the sink to dry; I reached deep)—
not lately or again: 
          We could make us a pact
to prevent reaching, could stitch half our fingers 
together, could start fresh from So nice to meet you. 
See my lips, how they part like a seed. Listen 
as I ask him to balance his fingers on the buds 
at the tip of my tongue. 
            Watch how I trust the gap 
in his teeth without seeing whether my fist 
might fit through them. We could stop 
    at the space 
at the edge of a lip with the trace of our fathers 
stitched into our hides, intestines in circles 
that coil round our feet, with the sleeves 
of their innards as punctuation 
for our pores
their hair in the thick of our skin, we could listen. 

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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