Bestiary
As in all good stories, you walked
into the wolf’s mouth and you were born:
when they found you, you had wrapped
yourself in the hide. You thought, everyone forgets
the skin is the body’s biggest organ. You thought,
one heart can house another. And so you stood
in a body, and you called the body yours:
no one remembered your family. No one
had heard of your town. You walked
into the wolf’s mouth and you were lost:
as in all good stories, they claimed
you for their own.
Morphine
That birds have bones
in their tongues—that they press
your hair in their beaks—that they carry
you home in pieces—your body
boneless as hair—that birds press
your bones in their beaks—that bodiless
hair lines a nest—that birds truss
their nest with your bones—that every
beak widens a wound—that birds
dive in, dive deep—that every wound
swallows a bird—that birds
dive straight to the bone—
that tendons are slender
as hair—that birds
tear muscle, tap bone—
that your bones ring hollow
as beaks—that birds carry
you home in pieces—
On the Physiology of the Heart
Recall the thin-skinned organ and visit the menagerie it houses: elephant, loon, flora, hound. A clamor in the atrium: the animals have hollowed out new passageways among their enclosures. You know the structure, the folded and enfolded tunnels, has weakened. When you release the animals, they know they should go, but tremble and remain. Collapse is imminent. You threaten to whip the ones that stay, but yoked to nothing their bodies assume helpless forms, and you can’t bring yourself to raise the switch. Instead, you kiss the heads of the animals one by one. The heart collapses into river, into whitewater. You open all the locks.
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Susannah Nevison is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Teratology, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2015, and is the recipient of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. In 2013, she received the American Literary Review poetry prize and an Academy of American Poets / Larry Levis prize for her work. Her poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, diode, Cider Press Review, JERRY Magazine, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. from the University of Southern California and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where she also teaches creative writing.
