Kelly Weber is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press) and the forthcoming chapbook The Dodo Heart Museum (Dancing Girl Press). 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, 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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Devil’s Rope, Testament’s WinterI met the deer at their trespass
—I crossed the boundary into the field. I hungered that bare gold, kneeling for any gun to shoot me for what I thieved in the raw air of the razed corn. Breath a tether binding me to that cold sky gone to star, caught by everything that sharpened against my ribs: men’s hands calling me their cunt, forgiveness for my shivering skin wanting their praise, mouths of the dogs I nursed at breasts of self-hatred and silence to hunt down others like me. I came here to be broken in dawn and its thicket, but not beneath the knife of a father to trade for a boy’s tremble. I know how to sever any angel from its vow, make myself clean with the unyielding pulse of my carotid, light jetting from the harvest in the four rooms of my chest. I came to be undone at the word just downwind of slaughter. The cut stalks I stole, truth, fire cleft at the base of lightning’s reaping, trying to carry in my fists back across a blood-morning wire. |