Bisecting the human liver is a little-known strip
of ligament that makes us acutely vulnerable
in high-speed collisions. As if to say, we were never meant
to travel with such haste. When stopped suddenly
by a seatbelt, this ligament can cut the liver into right
and left lobes, like a broken heart. Of course, the real divide
pertains to labor as complex as the balance of both
carrying oxygenated blood and draining bile,
a division of function over form. And yet

this final remnant of the umbilical vein—
that once-traveled highway that ferried nurture
through the womb’s dark universe to our tiny bellies,
a reminder of our origins— is now an abandoned road
a vestigial tourist stop in our evolutionary journey,
a monument to our mothers, a liability
if we ever get ahead of ourselves. Like a seatbelt,
our own liver tethers us to the world’s abdominal wall,
a reminder to look both ways, a reminder to go slow.