Piecemeal by Billie Tadros


1.

Sex is expectant.

Run the words together—sex, pectin—as in
that which binds. (The skeleton.)

2.

You two.
You too are—expectant.

I watch you pull on your jeans and cry

and still I have to tell myself when I dress
that this is not my fault.

(I keep seeing ivory, angles.)

3.

(break: line, time, bone.)

You say sorry, your joints fraying.

4.

You are why I love the notion
of a fossilized hatching,

both the breaking and the frozen
potential for survival preserved.

Come out.

5.

I take a quiet photograph: the curve
of your neck, break it with parabolic
cuts into puzzle pieces.

What is done to the photograph
is what I would like to do to what’s left

of your body, piecemeal.

 

Billie R. Tadros received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared or will appear in Barely South Review, Wicked Alice, and others, and in the anthologies Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013) and Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Press, 2013).