Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.
A Conversation with Kelly Weber
Emma Bolden: Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Kelly Weber: I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.
EB: One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?
KW: Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.
EB: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?
KW: Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.
EB: As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.
KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.
Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.
EB: What are you working on now?
KW: Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.
EB: What are you reading right now?
KW: I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.
_________________________________________
A Portfolio of Poetry by Kelly Weber
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.
_______________________________________________________
PORTRAIT OF CRIB WITH COYOTE SKULL INSIDE
1.
Because again the bar with steer horns
mounted above the bottles and mirror, ranchers with barb-
scarred knuckles clutching glasses
of whiskey, their dark lapels
gathered like ravens at their throats.
Because snow gathering in my mouth
from the street, forsythia caught behind my teeth.
Because my legs in tights, because fox and rabbit
sewn with sawdust and posed in pursuit around the room,
because my friend photographing flowers in her hair
and titling it theft—petal, long strand—
because the smell of aftershave and cigarette leaning forward,
someone pressing their breath to the back of my neck,
someone’s brother or someone’s father or someone’s son,
a door made of wrists I have chewed my way through—
2.
Because again the eyes of my mother
in the doe I approach in the woods.
My arm around her neck
pressing her long face soft as rust
against my cheek. Because once I used her hand mirror
to peer between my legs, pearls
studding the folds of pink lace
around the glass.
Like the flies that scripture her tongue
when I find her, hooves dangling off the flatbed.
Because my hands trying to lift the body
heavy as a child. Because for any hoofed thing
life must be a balance of panic and poise,
stillness before buckle into snow. Because it is my hand
on the knife, sawing hide from muscle and undoing
mother, your spine.
_______________________________________________________
QUEERPLATONIC: ALL ASPENS SHARE A HEART SYSTEM
But what are my lungs if not your hands buried in my chest? We sleep
in the mountain’s shadow, curled beneath a blanket of horsehair
and stars, kissed with kerosene and dust. Winds trembling daughter
aspens. If your father knew to call this queer, would he break
a wall or into a mouthful of snow? I watch dawn take the peak
from our cabin window, char forged to lake’s rippled ache, our blood
still learning to breathe up here, pink grafting granite to black sky, stars. You
rise from the bed we share as friends and run before me, fog a cradle of antlers.
If I press your small palm against my side to feel the frantic pulse,
frost will gather on your fingers like a window shocked warm.
If I erode my breath into praise, I can call this a kind of faith.
_____________________________________________
It is not faith, how a mountain gives up its winter
but the shock of killing warmth, fire hungering the lungs of birds.
If you press a palm to tundra, each blade can take a hundred years to pulse
back. My immunosuppressed body catches and lets go of each bright fracture.
Tell me how our blood locks across distances, hips a canyon of hard stars. Tell me
how I can’t even say I love you, my girl-mouth a wire in the dark.
I know how to starve for someone’s touch. You once scooped a bird that hit the wall,
your fingers so slender I saw red light through skin. You folded its trembling
in your hands and snapped its neck. We used to dance in the horse barn. You
gripping my wrists in the old smell of animal sweat.
I’ve risked sharing my breath with you.
_______________________________________________________
ENDINGS TO POEMS ABOUT GRIEF I CANNOT BEGIN
because in the months without touch
there was nothing but missing you, friend, nothing
but ache to hold you, but menstruating thick as candle wax,
but how you said my name
like the opposite of infection and T cell blooming,
us talking each other through each month with our faces pixeled
into wound, how I couldn’t bear to let myself love you
—skin-hungry and unjawed as a snake—
and you loved me anyway.
*
how she licked her fawn’s ear in dawn ash, how leaf-shaped soot
from the forest fire struck me right here in the sternum, where your arm
grafts my chest to you.
*
both of us counting all our losses in our uncut hair.
*
when the midwives open us, do they hold the grief in our hips
as gently as we do for each other?
*
I am that animal
dragging herself to the warm weight of friends
like you, how my chest is a pneumatic hive of breath and blood honey
rhyming matchstick with marrow and forest burned
with the small of my back, a place for you to cry.
*
we have loved each other so many years
and still we are learning the language to say I
invite you in, I trust with my sinew, womb, collar
—o star harness. you can always come home to this
perishing light though it is.
*
the disaster we took as future, as some time
has been unfurling its radiant ruin all along
beside us, all along our now kindling hoofs in my lungs,
thirst in the prickly pear spines we mistook for nipples.
*
quiet as a bone
you take my hand.
*
because if lightning gathers above us on horseback
we are supposed to climb off the mares’ warm bodies
and let the bolts strike them instead. because sometimes
we have no choice but to ground ourselves, to love ourselves enough
to love someone else. because we can rest our breath in each other
and trust the light that comes in all its fierce untethering.
*
—but instead, for you, just because you’re blueing a little today
I’d cut my mouth on wind
blowing the bluestem flat in snow,
sever my tongue and press it against your jaw
to fever down the words, press a steaming mug
into your palms. snow into a womb, hold bruise
-eyed chicks in my mouth for you. make a nest for our bodies
of steel and paper, tight as a knife
in a jealous boy’s pocket.
*
after I bled into a woman’s hands,
I sent you a card of a pressed yucca blossom
because I knew you were hurting, because I wanted you to know
you were loved. if you cup my shoulder, I will warm your palm
like a blue glass candle. I will keep finding ways to love you,
to beg more time of this sky stained with the lungs of birds
bending hunger to absent meridian, all these cicadas’ desperate faith
singing such unmiraculous extinction.
*
ash falling into your lungs, another medical bill in your hands.
I just
want to cover you.
*
the drawing of a trachea I made in health class, the body a loop
of graphite on butcher paper, the salmon-spill of belly
sketched rough but steady, the way my mother taught me:
one continuous line, an attention that, nonetheless, will not save us.
*
and I
keep measuring the time that is left by the length
of your ribs, by each year I have learned to open myself
more to you. the shelter we make of each other.
_______________________________________________________
ON BEING THE QUEER PERSON I WAS ALWAYS AFRAID I’D BE
when you breathe on the bed next to me
I remember when I went searching for wild foxes
because I didn’t want to keep holding your name under my tongue
until it killed me. Because I tried so hard not to love you, let you love me
but like the skinned heifer that fell off the back of the truck
that the flies found in the middle of the road near my house
I was zipped into such a sequined blood-humming
for you. You, hematite mercy in me
a lodestone I can find any time
I lose my way. This poem a home I’ve tried to make for you
the way I hold everything soft in my belly,
every highway where barbed wire stitches the winter clouds shut
looping across my hips, knees, sacrum. If you open your eyes
if you take my wrist’s pulse between your fingers,
the canyon’s frozen river will bloom purple lupine
right out of the ice, each valve in my chest a place you can hide
your unholiest prayers. You give me back to myself, make me
what I am, the way breath and flesh join at the sternum. Why
is it so hard just to say it, just to choir our tongues into words
all the fathers in our lives never wanted us
to learn? Before I met you, a woman accused me of my mouth
before I knew what it meant, before I knew if I wanted
to be her or be close to her, or that I was ace. And the rarest of times since
I thought I felt something for a girl, I learned to hold my breath
for you. Because it would’ve been easier just to stop my mouth
the way I stopped my hands from tightening your black peacoat
around you when it snowed around us in that mountain city,
when you told me your list of your dead you carry, and I
didn’t pull you into a hug so tight it crushed your paper coffee cup between us—
but now you say it and press your palms to my sick belly, the x-rays
of my gut looping up past my heart, the needle bruises in my thighs
where I have to wound myself every other week to stay alive.
I couldn’t find any foxes because they all died of mange.
So call this what it is—how you move toward me
first, how you say it when I can’t. Lace your fingers with mine across my navel—
call this a cauterized moon, the place where I separated from my mother’s body
to find yours. Call this belief blush and maxilla, index of fevers, call it fossil
that remembers water enough to be soft. Call it vein
encrypted with your voice, rhapsody of ghost, call it how I’ll always come find
you, call it so loud we can’t hear all the people grafting scripture to the air
against the local Pride club hosting a drag show to beat cancer. Call it
my immune system turning your hands gliding over me
to cloud shadow. Call it how language lives in a warm place inside you
and you invite me there. Because to be loved
by someone’s throat is to let the wind take you to your knees, to worry
you’re enough to depend upon. The heart an animal staggering away from the road
to the field of snow. Call her name and see how fast she can run
to your side. If you—if we—want to. If we let each other in. If stay. If we say it
there’s no going back. If your cheekbones are telephone wires splitting dawn
into stanzas of birds. If you open their singing inside me.
If you hold me here, one hand on my clavicle, against the cold,
if we can hug each other through the ribs like it’s enough.
