The Butcher's Wife Poem by Giles Watson

Sometimes the flayed things have spirits.

When my husband is drunk in bed, I go down
to the cellar to find them, their stripped
ribs heaving in the lamplight, as though
the liver and lights were still in-situ.
Eyes, hacked free of eyelids, have only one
expression: a sort of soulfulness. They say:
'Love me like a furred thing, and when I
sling myself over your shoulder, and my dead
head flops against your breast, don't forget
a kind caress behind the place the ear would
have been. Wear me like a bleeding shawl;
ascend the stairs, blood-clad as a birthing-
sheet, and let me out into the yawning,
sleepless street. Hear my whittled vertebrae
clacking into line, as I flounder to be free.'

I do this every night. My husband sleeps
with his dreams of fillets and soft meat.