Kelly Weber, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis

 

INSTEAD OF ANOTHER X-RAY

let your hands pull my ribs back today.
Not light dividing bone from the softer shadows
but your voice slitting me
from pelvis to chin, hiding among the hollows
feather after feather
like the yellow flower my mother painted
floating above the blue hills
while I slept under morphine, winter cloud.
Once I cared for an ashbed full of animal skeletons,
my throat swallowing fistful after fistful of glass.
All the fossils soft enough
to still be marrow instead of rock.
When I cradle the skull of the mare
again, you kneel beside me, both of us holding
the twelve-million-year-old body
giving birth to a stillborn foal cupped in her hips.
One hoof pressed against the absence
her heart makes. Morning pinks
the plains ice. You bury the birds in my pelvis
and say my name.
Our bones remember water. Each day
I negotiate another way to live.

I was immediately struck by American poet Kelly Weber’s incredibly powerful full-length poetry debut, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis (Berkeley CA: Omnidawn, 2023), following on the heels of their chapbook, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022). The poems here are dark, dense-thick and electric, articulating ongoing illness and first-person explorations of gender, asexuality and queerness, pushing and turning language back in on itself. “after I keep thinking / about the nurse who offered to sterilize me because I knew best / if I wanted another soft fontanelle breaking / into the world through me,” Weber writes, as part of the poem “AFTER THE RN WARNS ME ABOUT THE BLOOD,” “after I fold my diagnosis / of menhorragia, > three months and walk almost all the way home [.]” Weber’s lines utilize dense language across first-person nrarratives and there is a direct quality that appears straightforward at first, but bend as much as her lines unfold, and extend seemingly endlessly and breathlessly across an accumulation. As the poem “ANOTHER X-RAY” opens: “Any change you might be pregnant? When was the last time / you wanted to home against another girl’s throat and clavicle, / your mouth taut and mutinous with pearls? What is the name / for a girl who says she doesn’t feel attraction, who staves / her belly with powerlines punctured with birds calling / one minor key note over and over?” Weber writes on roadkill and desire, ash and vulnerability, grief and elegies, odes and an ongoing health crisis in powerful lines that build and build, increasing in strength until they finally burst. “Sometimes the body just needs: intransitive verb.” she writes, as part of the poem “JOKES ONLY ASEXUALS WILL UNDERSTAND {CLICK ON LINK TO OPEN NEW PAGE}.”