You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis

"Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones on highways, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queerplatonic intimacy and chronic illness. Through art and friendship, the poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. At the place where radiological light and meadow meet--at the site where the asexual speaker's body meets feather and fox skeleton--what love poem becomes possible? When the body is caught in both medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, how is a poetry fashioned despite--and out of--endings? How can a self-portrait be a form of agency when so many harmful images of the sick queer body are made by others? You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis explores these questions with forms that reach across the page, the plainspoken prose poem becoming its own strange field. In a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness, the speaker does not find easy answers. Rather, they find ways to make a life: with foreheads pressed together, with antlers in the grass"--

Kelly Weber (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Gulf Coast Online, Electric Literature's The Commuter, Hayden's Ferry Review Online, Southeast Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University.