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Trevor D. Ketner   

Amputation

My mother, who goes on living, asks us to dam her body by severing the parts that hurt,
that thirst even after drinking the length of the river. She tells my father to just do it, 

                                                      to  cut off  her hands  with a  knife 
                                                      while he cracks  and chops carrots; 
                                                      her  hands can’t  handle  the  knife.

She tells my father to just do it to cut off the place the thunderstorms crack, as if cutting 
the mouth from the river will make it stop, which it will, but a sea is fed by more than one


                                                          mouth, and the world is filled 
                                                                       with manifold seas. She asks 
                                                          to be opened as if pain resides 
                                                                       in the body like thirst, when pain
                                                          is thirst is a strain of desire.

I tell her desire isn’t held in the tongue, which is difficult and discomforts me because I 
already cut my tongue out to stop wanting. 





Trevor D. Ketner is a second year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Minnesota. He has had poetry and fiction appear in Sycamore Review, Pif Magazine, Fjords Review, other journals, and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. He recently received the 2014 Gesell Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2013 Wabash Prize for Poetry.




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