Billie R. Tadros

LIGHTER FLUID: THEMES AND VARIATIONS

1.

Light or flutes, her cylinders.

What illumines a votive.

2.

Lied, or fluent, as she told

me about half-life, burn time.

3.

Lye tour flumes, we channel

we try we tie we cleanse.

4.

Like airfoils cutting air

there’s fireflight curved.

5.

Like her falls I’ve lost

what is ignition.

WARFARE: THEME AND VARIATIONS

1.

Wares for—munitions, store.

Real violence is in preparation.

2.

Worse for a broken shelter,

the ruined well a thrombosis.

3.

Warfarin—after the swallow

I begged him to stop bleeding.

4.

Wherefore I tell you now because

of all the collapsed causeways letting.

5.

Wear four pockets like cardiac

chambers, vacant maps.

6.

We’re foreign now as clotting

factors we learn to close.

TWENTY-SIX WORDS FOR VULVA:
L is for LYRE

This is your vibrating gut
strung soundbox.

I hold the plectrum in my right
hand, strike you like plague
and resonate

like pleasure, every measured
echo in your hollow

but your shape sings only
throat, harps turn back,

you bottlenecking liar.

TWENTY-SIX WORDS FOR VULVA:
W is for WHALEBONE

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Billie R. Tadros is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a graduate of the MFA program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her poem “Reactor” was recently chosen by Sandra Beasley for the 2012 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Barely South Review, the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Yalobusha Review, and in the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).