Three Poems by Susannah Nevison

Chamber

As in music, as in a division of the heart.
As in a grave, or a small room, or a house
for a doll or a bullet. As in the body is material
and a bullet shapes it. As in the long hall that stretches
between us. As in singing, as in what shapes
the music as it comes barreling down.

Where We Are

What’s come undone: the knots we practice

in our sleep, on our own wrists. When a body

stops writhing, we imagine fish

on the floor of a boat, heaving

until they don’t. What Abraham couldn’t have

known: the quiet untying of a body

gone slack, the hands’ work light and fast.

God never said here I am and where we are

God knows. There’s no one here

to ask. Where we are, the quiet pools

like water. We wash our hands.

We put away the rope.

Prisoner’s Tubal Ligation with the Archangel Gabriel

The warden comes down
like Gabriel with news
of the Lord that you are
blessed among women
and opens the door to the cell
you keep, the blessed door
of the tomb you keep, unearths
you with news and leads you,
among women, to a room
where God waits in blue
gloves with men who
lower their instruments
in the light of the Lord,
the city of the Lord within
you, blessed among cities,
an instrument of God.
And God’s men have come
to fell the soft scaffolding,
so that you, who know not
a man, may know only
your body as God’s
empty room, an empty
tomb you keep, so that
the warden should come
to your door like Gabriel
with news of the world, the war,
with the blinding light
of the Lord just out of reach.

Susannah Nevison is the author of Teratology (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. New work can be found in, or is forthcoming from, Crazyhorse, The National Poetry Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is a 2016 Clarence Snow Fellow and doctoral candidate at the University of Utah.