Powershell: Accessing the pipelined object

I am baffled a little, I can't figure this out. I have the following code, it just replaces the character at the 2nd place with nothing. $list -replace $list[1],"" this isn't special.
However, I would like to know how to pass $list via pipeline and access it.
something like this:
Command-With-String-Output | replace-some-how pipvar[1],""

Thanks.


Thanks @SimonS

$list = "abcde"
$list | %{$_ -replace $_[1],"" }
acde