Crown of Screws

By Kelly Weber

Issue 42 • Fall 2020 • Poetry

1st Place Poetry

2020 Summer Contest

“Crown of Screws” is a poem that’s fractured but whole. A lyrical intelligence, which surges inward and outward, tethers a body in pain to other bodies, to the natural world, to the political body. This kind of gorgeous thinking simultaneously mends and rends the lyric space; it infuses the page with cascading musics and startling language.

– Eduardo Corral

with her hands between my legs she asks / if I want to keep going /
on her shoulder a blue hawk / plunges cobalt nickel and beryllium ink
into / the little card of faces this nurse handed me to ask / how often
have you been feeling this way this clear / loop of face crying / I
pointed to / my face why are you sad she asked / I can’t stop all this
salt / pouring out of my skull I / can’t stop double-breathing the circle
of uterus / dancing above my head the poster of menstrual cycle / egg
sliding down tube to / land how long does it take to make skin
permanent how long does it / hold memory of hands pressing a needle
across / town a crowd of grandmothers hold signs protesting a judge
/ what is indelible in the tough gray matter of the brain do / you use
birth control she is asking no / I’m ace aro my Crohn’s medicine is
failing or I’m just / dying these days bear down / she says / bear down
it will hurt less / I weep into her blue-gloved / wings bear down air

each day men bring down a new law about my body I scroll I wing all
night through my feed the text on the white crystal and I am one of
the privileged ones I have so little to fear by comparison I am clicking
one law after the next then onto an auction page for a deer skull the
long gray rack tined across a blonde hardwood floor I keep myself
from buying things by practicing what my counselor taught me trigger
the mammalian dive complex plunging my face into a blue bowl of ice
water make the body think it is drowning and it will try to save itself
forget all other fears I made a bowl like this once not for this but to
teach little girls about earth’s atmosphere helping us to breathe I tried
not to think about how one in six of them would be grabbed by a man’s
hands that they were breathing air conceived in a body conceived in a
body already carbon-fourteened by a chain of fathers who decided so
precisely what would grow in her body and could never be cut out

the speculum is cut from stainless steel with such precise decision
the speculum has a racist and sexist history
the speculum has not been replaced with more comfortable forms
the speculum’s pain is expected it feels this with a kind of steel light
the speculum finds it normal to experience this to be told no big deal
the speculum thinks a white meadow spewed with screws an engine
the speculum shouldn’t hurt and people are disturbed when it doesn’t want babies
the speculum flattens a cloud says tits wants the dark red flesh
the speculum rasps winter’s chords into a kiss a hawk’s stoop
the speculum thinks of itself as a dominant subject position
the speculum can reveal bad cells especially for those who are chronic
the speculum is desert hinge widening pale violet cliff in inner lobes
the speculum staggers after tracks across thin snow in high desert
the speculum just wants to be loved just wants to see be seen wants

when she swabs a sample from me I cry harder I want I just want

to go home to a place when my body wasn’t afraid wasn’t always such

a long slide into zippers and letters a place I mine the iron out of my

blood into teem of wild of thistle of branch of thought of small baby

bones I once was here the air is so waxen and arrhythmic here

I want to slide under the hands of a virgin’s cold lead skeleton

headlights to cast my shadows across a road staggered with roadkill

chambers nested into mouths gone exquisite with broken bottles

every girl cries when she comes here she is saying between the stirrups

of a pale horse that bears a headless angel on its back wings hollow

boned tipping through cervix gasoline she says yes it’s uncomfortable

my friend got cancer on the pill you can get cervical cancer even when

not actively swallowing someone else’s drowning if you’re anxious if

you’re chronic if you live in these skies singed with a crow’s thought

under my brain’s sky it is difficult to singe
new neural pathways. I feel bad for him he just
made a mistake he’s not a bad person just a little
lost. the lake I lower myself into is a long drop
to mud and fish bones where he says he can hear
me. I push my voice through water to tell him
all the ways he’s harmed me and other women
looking at us describing our body
of work. he says you don’t understand me.
I say can you just make a little more effort. he says
he has a hard time with things, begins to weep.
I empathize he goes on weeping antlers pushing
up through my throat and jaw I’m sorry
I say but can’t around the bone he cries feel bad for me feel bad for feel bad

feel-bad skin feel-bad hair feel-bad clothes I ask and ask
no it’s not uncomfortable it’s pain don’t unlanguage
this tell myself don’t say it’s not pain don’t say
it’s not don’t tell yourself to close your legs
and lower your hips into the sink close your legs lower
your hips close your legs lower your hips off the pubic
bone into a shaft of light over horsetooth reservoir the town
flooded down below that can hardly bear
the weight of all that water anymore all the ghosts
that cannot be born but must be must be
each hook saying bear more
bear more
bear more
bear more

try imagining the best thing that could happen / more
my counselor says I try / I wake up / tomorrow covered
in orioles each / set of lungs tapping me with their beaks
hammering / me into new song that migrates / toward
more tender skies full of power lines I slide / into them
like breath poured / into a herd of animals running down
to the water / to be rid of / pretty baby pretty baby look
at her teeth and how small her / clattering down the little
darknesses / when I walk / out of this exam room I will
not stop weeping for two hours or hurting for two / days
must there always be such daughtering / such slow
division of water and oxygen / split at the forgetting to
find a new way to be / to keep going to find a way to law
to live / falling up a way for hands and legs to keep going

Kelly Weber

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, 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

Despy Boutris

Despy Boutris’s writing has been published in Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, Guest Editor for Palette Poetry and Frontier, and Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.