Few words in English argue with themselves the way "cleave" does. It means to split apart and also to cling together, and Marcette's poem is built on that contradiction. The title, "Cleavage," first sounds like geology, the way a crystal splits along its lines of weakness. The poem delivers on that, then turns the word inside out in its second half: "you can cleave me apart and / I'll cleave myself together."
The first stanza is an accusation disguised as an endearment. The speaker calls her lover "Baby," then tells him he values her only as a broken thing: "You only think I'm pretty when I break." Her chosen comparison is precise. Phosphophyllite is a rare, delicate mineral, prized for its colour and easily split. The sheer length and strangeness of the word makes her sound like a specimen, something to be displayed rather than known. The geode pushes the idea further. A geode looks plain outside and glitters within, and the only way to see the crystals is to smash it. As the "hammer," the lover gets to reveal her beauty and take credit for it. The stanza's last line is its sharpest: "You break me apart and admire your own strength." He admires not what is inside the stone but the swing of his own arm. Even her grief is consumed. Her tears are "your nectar," the sweet drink of flowers and gods, so that pain becomes something he feeds on.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme scheme and no steady metre, but it leans hard on repetition. "Break" appears three times and "apart" three times, so the vocabulary itself keeps cracking and falling open. "Baby" opens both stanzas, though the word changes in tone, from sardonic to something nearer tenderness or weary patience. One line does slip into near-perfect iambic rhythm, and it is the cruellest: "You ON-ly THINK I'm PRET-ty WHEN I BREAK." The most regular line in the poem is the one about breaking, as if his idea of her has a tidy, predictable beat.
The second stanza loosens and quickens. The first stanza is mostly flat, end-stopped statements, while here lines hang open on connecting words ("apart and"), as though the speaker is thinking aloud. Then comes the blunt, short line "Do it to me." The ending is the cleverest piece of construction. The sentence breaks across the line, "No matter how many times I break / Apart for you," so the form itself splits the phrase "break apart." There is no full stop, which suggests the process isn't finished.
What gives the poem its tension is how the speaker's grammar changes. In the first stanza she is acted upon: "you break me." In the second she acts, and the reflexive "cleave myself together" quietly shifts the real power. His strength is one blow, while hers is the repeated labour of repair. Yet the poem refuses to let this become a simple victory. "If you'll need to be cruel" treats his cruelty as a need to be accommodated, and the closing words, "for you," still make him the reason she breaks. The geode metaphor strains too, because a cracked geode cannot heal. Her claim to do what stone cannot reads as pride, but perhaps also as exhaustion, or as a story she tells to make the damage bearable.
That doubleness is what makes the poem worth reading. It takes the familiar image of a woman as a precious, fragile jewel and turns it against the person who holds it. In twelve short lines it asks whether endurance is a form of strength or just a way of making harm sustainable. The poem doesn't answer, and the title's double meaning explains why. To cleave is to break and to hold at once, and the speaker seems to be doing both.