The Butcher's Wife

You made me watch
in the room that was made
for gutting chickens and goats.
You made me watch
you

cutting their throats, your hands
the color of strawberries. Your face
hard as bullet-proof glass, thick, opaque
and soundproof. Eyes like gravel. And how

through my nausea, I thought of sex,
how similiar the feelings: fear, then horror,
the downward, slick, graceful then upstroke
of the knife tearing through skin, muscles

and tendons, splitting the explosive artery.
How the body falls from the hands, quickly
as if filled with stones. Its head twisted back,
its mouth filled with blood. The way that you skinned it

pulling the feathers and fur, angled your blade
and expertly cut away.