A Dictionary of Having Been Prey in the Voice of the Grandmother

Replaced by stones in the sewn belly, I could finally be the beast.

Up from the bed I could finally be and the woods were a taste
gracing lichen and teeth and I had the raw aesthetic of deadness
and meat. Finally, I had the limbs it took to recover me.

Split from the belly I was at last and the housecoat had a language
like breath and my life was a theft of something like me
but not like me. The child was not the scar of me, was not meek,

I had been eaten, I was the beast. I had the taste of bewildered flesh,

I had been puppeted by my undone death, I was a sentiment of rebirth.
I had a continent of the canine teeth and the lolling tongue and
of the digestive tract. The bitter juices that licked me whole.

I had an old sense of the precise in me. Kicking its way
to nurse me back. The woodsman had a body like breath
and a deft axe and I was the one by the arm he pulled out,

new with a float of the row toward death, the end about me.

The child with wide eyes had believed. The housecoat had soothed
like a breeze her soft eyes and the fierce wolf had crossbred
deception with all he could eat. The woodsman, the hunter,

one reptile lick since what is a skin but the fair want inside,
the saunter that comes with forgetting the need,
since what is the eye but its syphilis haunt, as the pupil

grew wide (to be at the throat) and narrowed with desire

the folded hands and the tidy sewn quilts and the quaint
kitchens, and I was but a sullen knit suckled at the hum and grip,
mother to the dark rehearsal, I was only a version or test.

I went back from the path through the woods, back to a girl
I hardly knew, though I moved her hands and said her words,
and in my stead a desire to be, beast and not beast, as neither can last

beyond the feed. A nestling of stones in my lone robe of flesh.