Mistaking the crawdad’s severed claw
for a tooth, you bend to the water  

and the water bites you
or so you imagine  

thinking the claw        reanimated
the nerves un-dependent on the fuller animal  

To need only a part of ourselves
to move through this world  

But isn’t that how it often is—
the handiwork of suppression  

composing an erasure from the source-text
of our lives                  this remaining, this not