Offered as Suddenly a Forest, and: Branches

Offered as Suddenly a Forest

Imagine a desert and call it yearning.For years, nothing but sand

in your teeth: The viper skullsyou mistook for cherries, their

crunch, dry-heave sobs, beatingyour chest, you could’ve opened

the cage of your ribs like a prayerbook. Remember how you praised

every misplaced grace of waterhow the collected drops shot

through you with diseases. Everyfresh-found fruit a hallucination

each scavenged seed a swallowednail, until one day you look up

from your feet, a hawk condescendsfrom the sky, its cry saws the air

and there suddenly against your facean entire forest.

    You stand stupidlyat its feet, this monolith so inevitable

you should have seen it cleavedbetween the sand and the sky

like a sheet, coming with its darkits greens so deep they’re purple

as the veins of your leg, so purpleyou could unthread them each

and gum the grapes off. The treesoffer you everything.

At home, your lover bends againstso much scrutiny. He wonders

into becoming anything otherthan a forest, and you made it

this far, but linger at the edgeas if you could enter.

Branches

And suddenly, expectedly, mothers startedto reach their arms, fists to elbows, downtheir children’s mouths and throats, intothe sugar-laden lining of the stomach.Fathers did, too;

      husbands their wives’their husbands’ throats; sisters their brothers’their mothers’; and my brothers even reachedinto a man on the street with a paper crane.We’d been told we would find some new

         pleasurethere. We had a notion the insides held answersto all our untenable questions. A teenager mightgo missing for days, so her mother would plungedown the tongues

      of the kid’s friends; the missinggirl’s sister, alone in a bedroom, would chokeon her own crackling elbows, grasping for whatshe might have forgotten.

        Each time an armwas pulled out of a mouth, it came coated:In short, once inside, the limb made a castlike a silicone mold

       of whatever it touched:Impressions like pink dish-washing glovesmade of blood, guts, and dinner

         drew outof the head like a yawn: The coating sloughedwhole off the arm, intact, peeled off as a swimcap, thick as wax, and wriggling

         with rubbery veins.People would squeeze off these casts and leavethem, indiscriminately, anywhere.

        They calledthese the branch of an arm for their likenessesto roots, to the trunks of young trees. Streetswere littered with branches.

         In living roomspeople made shelves of the things. Havingbeen asked through the stomach

        for answersI myself grew a crop of unreachable questions.I phoned Mother, told her I’d be coming homesoon

  then got ahold of her spleen and foundnothing. I left her with those first little branchesdripping, inspected, and thrown on the eaves.I branched out to others: my sister

         whose roofin Houston thatched casts of her, her husband’sher little boys’ innards;

         sequences of strangerswhose bare-naked knees ground my rug to its stitcheswho entered through any obtainable hole

        droppedinto me for answers and left empty-handedthe veins on their fingers in the cracks of my grin.I reached out to the preacher but found only wafersand prison-grade beef.

     I littered the drippingsof politicians and recycled a stack of historians’ suppers.

  Of late, I’ve been thinking aroundthe question of my sensitive lover’s insides.I haven’t reached often

        though I wouldn’t saynever (his fifth and sixth kidneys are swingingon cords over the sink to dry; I reached deep)—not lately or again:

         We could make us a pactto prevent reaching, could stitch half our fingerstogether, could start fresh from So nice to meet you.See my lips, how they part like a seed. Listenas I ask him to balance his fingers on the budsat the tip of my tongue.

       Watch how I trust...