Three Poems

1

Why his liver?
That’s what I want to know.
If it had been me, I feel sure
That God would’ve taken my voice.
And it wouldn’t have been a violent desecration, either, with the mysterious restoration
In the night while the victim slept, wiped out, from the brutal operation
No, more like a borrowing—a book from the library, slyly
Returned with a different page dog eared each day.

2.
Surely I came from the fire
Of their newly minted love,
One piece hot from the furnaces of Hephaestus,
Another wet and glistening
Via a conch shell,
Like my mother, naked and ridiculous in my unabashed joy.
And we together, in the blessed moments at sea
Still had no clue that once she washed to shore,
The marriage would be forced
Arranged
Cobbled, even-
a beauty not even pretending to love a kind hardworking hunchback.

And now we leave pieces of ourselves all over the earth.

3.
In the sill of the window
In the frame of the door where you’ve been hanging
By the tips of your fingers
Casually
For minutes now
Neither in nor out
In the almost silence of the passing cars.

Nerissa Nields
Jan. 28, 2007