2 poems – Yalobusha Review

little song, quickening

a cry clean as a coffin at the party everyone softly competes to hold the baby and I cannot make myself feel this rain glazes the glass they are saying my pretty girl my pretty girl a soft pink eucharist face crumbling on the boat we can see the shadows of fish on the sonar branches poking above the lake’s shore I touch my lips am I a woman am I femme enough if I don’t want small bones pressed against my chest on land the fontanelle forest is gray & stripped of bark by deer everyone wants to hold the thing in my chest a doe unfolds its hooves hold me steady if she breaks loose she can’t swim neither of us can I can be as small as a baby’s fourteen-inch box

Aroace Girl with Kettles and Cradles

I make space for everyone and for every man’s anger

like lead in milk I know how to be invisible even to myself

come morning I’ll be girl again

but tonight I’m unchurched jawbone chewing sulphur from

a match for every time I’ve smiled in spite of

I shut out the mouths of everyone who wants

to feed from whatever teat they can find on me

I bow in a kitchen fulminated to such unfamiliar light

I tear my lips off so no words soften

my spine to salt—I slide my hand down to cradle

every name for the extinction I pull from between my thighs

loving no one but myself

I am so unconscionable

a heart boils in the belly of every kettle screaming like a baby

I will arrange all my locks

of hair on the floor and call them my periods

severed from the ends of sentences for people

all I’ve grown just to cut away

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, 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.