Hi, I'm Zach Linge. I'll be reading my poem "Fingers on a Gay Man".

Fingers on a Gay Man

A pair of adolescent boys grabs a rabbit to shear off its ears. It doesn't matter why, whether they're sad or from city. What matters is what they do with their hands: hold the blade, hang the rabbit by its ears. But the rabbit says, "I met a truck-stop priest in Mississippi outside Books-A-Million, should I tell you what he said?" And the boys pause to consider, so he continues, "We sat into the night talking about anything: his gay ex-wife who practices witchcraft, masturbation with vacuum hoses, his fetish for boys' leg hairs—like your own!" They giggle at this and scream, set the rabbit down, and listen. "The priest in his collar and cross necklace spoke, though his face transformed: he grew freckles where there weren't any freckles; he grew beards where his chin was smooth; and his eyes were more ancient than all the lakes in Mississippi." What did he say? What did he say? the boys demand, wanting to learn, more than anything. Continues the rabbit, "The faces spoke, not the priest, in voices that traveled to my brain. They taught me lessons. First, that every soul is a thread in a cloth that floats through black everything, sparkling like snow into a lake. So you, and I, and everyone we know are iterations of these souls, these cloths, some newly woven, and some old." The boys: What else did the faces say? The rabbit: "They said that they and I were of a single cloth, of the type who dies and rises again." And what about us? What about us? demand the boys, and the rabbit jumps off the rock and runs because the boys hold a knife and can't recognize a parable or my face, however human.