BY KELLY WEBER
And o lord now that the rain’s come down—as this water’s broken
out of clot and turgid sky, as women have been sewn up in prayers
and stitched with gold seed in their mouths, as corn fields have sogged and turned
and as the foxes have been hunted from their haunt, this splinted animal
splintering all the houses, as slabs of ice have slid on highways and across bridges
like clotless angels and as, with each new bitterness, the men
who rule over us in the wind-treed land of my mothers
only laugh, carry away women on their heavy-sacked bulls to plunge
into the water ringed with wounds of red-winged blackbird cries—now that the rain
has come, I am trying to find a way to let the flood through me, o lord, I am trying
to spill, I am trying to let blue water jet between each vertebrae and course
out of flesh, between my breasts, hungry ghost clouding the navel
with blood and oil—my ribs are churches where the small-skulled coyotes once trotted
in winter, now eradicated, and I fashion their hunger, I roll over at night
where men try to pluck two black keys from my back and leave me crossless till morning
and o lord I am tonguing words backward, I am warning men I am mother
country covered blue, stagnant water left to rot in tomb of cervix,
anxious so long but now speaking, now uttering every syllabic I
am spitting back every word, I am throwing dead and all the bones your way, seething
for each time I stayed silent when you screamed my shape, summoning dry valleys
I am making a new covenant out of the stiff-legged corpses of cattle washed
throats bared in the country of black sky sweating needles of stars, each breath
a hand mirror, pulling fish from my clavicle drowning behind truck glass this rain
this rain, this rain, blistering pink, I fashion a rope and a knife with which I will see
all of you men fall—I who stand here with all the other women like horses
clumped beside birch trees bending under sleet on the sandbar, stamping
and shaking their heads until the first, driven desperate by hunger, wades into water
and starts across, caught in molars of ice in the current, white and holy as salt
heart a hot thumping stone sunk in cold that tries to drag it from that farther shore.
Kelly Weber holds an MFA from Colorado State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Qu, Mud Season, and elsewhere. She has been longlisted for the [PANK] Book Contest and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has been an editorial assistant for Colorado Review.