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and it’s true sometimes / someone looks at me asking nothing / and I want that face cupped between my palms / a door hinged open / with a gray severed wing rocking in it / I saw once walking into my office / and its small brick rooms / everything that tethers / twisting red from that bare knob of bone / a whole series of inward knots / I hold in my hands / and it’s true I’ve never broken up with anyone / never let anyone kiss my jaw into a riot of thistle / a ring of dark-eyed junco and barbed wire / I’m bound to / never been that hell across a throat / but sometimes I want to sit with someone’s wrists / between my knees pearl / their pulse with eggs from the fallen wasp nest / drowned in a honeycomb of spit and bark / the work of such careful attention / and days / I used to tend an ashbed where the excavated skeletons / of ancient deer and horses sprawled / bellies torn open by dogs and birth canals / tangled with small bones / they wanted to keep close / I have tried to commit a life to such bright forgetting / of the many fractures I’ve asked blessed / again and again the rattlesnakes crushed on highway / shadow of a train strutted across my body / hauling blades to wind farms toothed and bleached / like the maw of some lost ichthyosaur / and yes it’s true / I want / to bless the water broken / to make one more day to live / on raw / gasoline and looking at someone who trusts / their softness to my breathing / in the spaces we share / I get it / dying for someone I mean / I’ll always want to tug their dark coat / tighter press my forehead to theirs against wind say / goddamn / before they walk into snow / remove a bone too soon / and it bruises the memory of water / from the ground
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Kelly Weber is the author of the debut poetry collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Dodo Heart Museum (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Her work has received Pushcart nominations and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Brevity, The Missouri Review, Cream City Review, Palette Poetry, Southeast Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.
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