Wishbone
“You can’t make homes out of human beings.”
— Warsan Shire
Wishbone
He appraises me as though my bones
were fashioned for breaking,
two limbs diverging from a sacred centre,
his hunger already choosing
which half it intends to keep.
There is an unfeeling felony in such looking,
the way desire can undress a person
until even personhood becomes superfluous.
He makes an altar of my anatomy,
then calls appetite reverence.
He would tie me to his tongue
and still not know the aptitude of my name.
He mistook possession for intimacy,
lust for fractured divinity,
my body for some reliquary
he might prise apart for providence.
His eyes of penitence arrived too late.
Beneath fractured halos,
what hollow absolution resurrects
a woman reduced to portions:
mouth, waist, thighs,
the convenient mathematics of flesh?
He had already tested where I was weakest,
where the bone would give,
how much wanting could be mistaken
for tenderness before it became cruelty.
That was the anatomy of absence:
to be entirely present
inside a body someone else
had already erased me from.
I was no omen for his wanting,
no little bone upon which
he might wager a wish.
Yet he still broke me.
But he did not know what wishbones remember:
that they once belonged to wings,
that fracture is a hinge, not an ending,
that some things split
without surrendering themselves.
He expected two obedient halves,
a clean division,
something small enough to possess.
Instead, the fracture disclosed
what his hunger had failed to comprehend:
I had never belonged to the bone.
And if time turns,
will scars stain the sky?
Let them.
The larger fragment in his fist
never meant he won.
It was only proof
that possession leaves evidence.
He had to break a thing that flew
to believe it was his.
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