bu / colic

Kelly Weber

Kelly Weber is the author of the chapbook The Dodo Heart Museum: A Fabulist Curiosity Cabinet (Dancing Girl Press, 2020), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Fourth River, Qu, Mud Season, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Frontier Chapbook Prize and Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize and has been longlisted for the [PANK] Book Contest, and her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She has received professional support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference workshop and served as an editorial assistant for Colorado Review. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University.

[from through the falling horse]

And when called I sit in silence before the doctor and the cross-section display of guts divided like a fish to reveal all its milt and muscle. Listen to the broken water and think of you; he and other gastroenterologists don’t understand the mechanisms of how medications fail over time but I think of this as light and water, gneiss shafted into black ravens dissolving in a white sky, and I feel small as bone, small as daylight, stunned into blue. And I take the paper sack and the prescriptions to fill and lean my head against the wall punctured with mountain chickadee cries—a string of teeth knotted into granite, ulna gerund. I take notes, I count tests, I am heavy as blade and half-listening with hammer and stirrup to the doctor telling me the MAP bacteria may cause the same inflammation in cattle as in me. Heads blunt anvils and tabernacles of hunger. Everything is made of oxygen; I cytokine roads to me, here, in this small Front Range office, and I hew my mouth’s yawning bullet grace to whatever words may emerge though meaningless, as I am called to be X-rayed and walk across the hall, pinching the blue gown and its strings at the small of my back, and I slide onto the table to be seen and to be given the silver disc with the hole in the center the technician hands me after light has uncoupled my pelvis: the bottom curve of my breasts, the black rope of intestine hooked into the shape of a lyre across my middle. No pastoral includes this—the drought, the radiation, the fluorescent lights twining a flaring river’s belly above my head, my body naked before I pull boots back over ankle bones and turn to write to you—

Issue 10.1