"you were a whole country away from me by then//she was a hole"
Something seems unburiable in "inter: burial places." Each poem clutches that prefix, poems excavating loss and longing and the impossibility to move beyond someone you've loved: "you've swum the reaches//of love but just because you surfaced/doesn't mean it's not hypoxia."
Billie Tadros brings vulnerability to our lips in a cup. Sometimes the 'you' is "a whole country away," other times the 'I' and 'you' fall into dandelions together. Sometimes they are called 'we.' Sometimes "stop over stop/overlapping stop/lapping at me." But often it's that luminal in-between space that's explored, or the richoceting between "I could core//you I could/cure you" and why shouldn't it? After all, this collection is called "Inter," meaning "between," "in the midst of," but meaning also "reciprocally," "together," "mutually." I like "in the midst of" best - that storm-center feeling her poems give: "if I can't have you/anywhere I'll have you/everywhere."
There's a sense of regret, time-loss, betrayal (I was/yours I was/your vibrating/medium I was/your bridge your cavity/music) in this collection, this juxtaposed love/lunging-for-the-jugular thing. This comes through perhaps best in intermittent, one of my favorites from the chapbook.
And I think what's and the end of that poem is what I love best about reading Billie. There's this on and off business (un)burying our demons. We're up to our necks in heart meat.