Asking My Liver For Forgiveness
by Rob Cook

WASHING AWAY THE PERMANENT COLOR YELLOW

I took my liver from its swollen house
and washed it carefully with a cloth
made from my troubled yellow silence.

I washed my liver until it licked my hand.
I washed my liver and it leaked
a poisonous ocean breeze.

I let my liver play with all the other livers
I freed from that fatty ditch in my side.
I watched them squirm like sponges on the bed.

But then their squirming stopped, and I felt the nausea
of a hermit crab when the livers froze into a fatal
moonlight, scavenging the tiredness for their shells.