A tailbone is not where anyone expects a love poem to begin. Jasmine Christi's "Atavistic" opens with a claim that sounds like a magazine ranking, "The best part of a woman's body is just here", and the word "here" does a lot of work. It points, as if the speaker's hand were already resting on the spot. Then comes the swerve: "Where your tail used to be." The coccyx, the small remnant of an ancestral tail, becomes the place of desire. The line is funny and tender at once, and the speaker seems to know it. "Maybe it's atavistic of me" turns the joke inward. Atavism means the reappearance of something ancestral, so the speaker diagnoses their own attraction as a throwback.
The poem is in free verse, three tercets with no regular metre, and it sounds like someone thinking aloud. Its one clear rhyme is "be" and "me", which closes the first stanza with a small click, like a punchline landing. After that the rhyme disappears and the voice relaxes into plain statement. The vocabulary is mostly short and ordinary, which makes "atavistic" stand out. It is a four-syllable, Latinate word among simple ones, so it sounds a little too learned for the moment, and that is part of the humour. The second stanza then makes the word itself the subject. The speaker kept notebooks of "Words I learnt and never used", and the example given is "Words like atavistic". There is a quiet paradox here. The speaker says they never used these words, yet the poem has already used one. The poem is where the notebook finally gets opened.
The father enters almost by accident: he "came across" the notebooks. The phrase suggests a private thing stumbled upon, but the poem never says how he reacted. That silence is one of its strongest effects. All we get is a judgement, "intelligent but conflicted", in which the "but" carries both respect and reproach. We aren't told what he was conflicted about. The reader may connect it to the notebooks, to the speaker's ambitions, or to the frankness of the first stanza, but the poem only invites that guess without confirming it.
The last stanza changes pace. Its lines are longer and more abstract, full of words like "ideas", "filter" and "generation". The line break after "these" holds back the noun "ideas" for a beat, so the sentence itself seems to filter through slowly. The final line, "For the notebooks to be of use", echoes the earlier "never used". The unused words are promised a use, but only later, in someone else's time. The ending is patient rather than triumphant, and slightly rueful. The speaker's "I think" also answers the earlier "Maybe". Both hedges show someone who says something bold and then softens it, and that habit of cautious speech may be part of what the poem is about.
What makes "Atavistic" worth reading is how much it holds in so few lines, especially three kinds of inheritance. The tail belongs to deep evolutionary time, the father to the speaker's immediate past, and "another generation" to a future that has not arrived. The word "atavistic" looks backward, while the poem's last gesture looks forward. Between those points sits something very personal: a vocabulary gathered in secret and a body described in a borrowed, scientific word. The poem suggests that language can be a hiding place and an inheritance at once, and that a word kept in a notebook is waiting for a world ready to hear it. It manages this without raising its voice, in a tone that is half joke, half ache.