the anthropomantic liver
It’s the shake, the trembled after-night
that thrums the body into one long nerve.
It’s the heat peaking, the spires
recording distant, unfelt earthquakes.
Blood surges the vein, pulls in time
to distant tides inside the body
offered, pinned ground to side, dark
part of the eye wound up to the sky,
exposing the egg-white to the flickering
length of the knife. Flint strikes the flame
to feed the divine the invisible
in pitch-hued fumes ascending
from the nest knit in bone black—
what remains, returning to earth.
the liver as regenerator
I trace the story read off a scar.
Beams striking horizon bend
and return the world, line
by color. The liver returns.
The sky-blackened vulture spirals—
I return to recite and lick the red,
the pearl-white knitting skin.
I return to recite what I cannot afford
to do: this organ the closest thing
to living I can carry.
I guard this dark distiller,
this filter part. A rough foot
from the heart, it waits
to be called, quartered, handed out.
Maggie Queeney is the author of setter, winner of the 2017 Baltic Writing Residency Poetry Chapbook Contest. Recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, her most recent work can be found in The American Poetry Review, North American Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She reads and writes in Chicago.