Kelly Gray
Ahead, a doe, her veined ears twitching between what is seen and unseen. Scent glands pulse and droplets fall from swollen genitals. In the dark of the woods, I enter the doe feet first; fold between organs, rest my head on the first chamber of stomach, smell fermented berries and acorns. When she opens her mouth, I look out, throw our two tongues at silly squirrels, clean the inside of her teeth with mine. I marvel at her length of vertebrae; my hands glide interior. Such soft fat, such soft tissue. To be carried as if precious, at last. The pelvis as if a mask. I press my face to bone, wrap tendons around my ears, attach my umbilical cord to the inside of her uterus; the blood-rich placenta receives. With miniature needles I stitch together our veins, embroider our arteries into rich maps of the forest floor. What can I hear through the backside of a deer? Men stepping in her footsteps. I peer out from her vaginal canal. Go faster, I say. She shifts from seen to unseen.
Kelly Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods and, in addition to her four other jobs, she teaches poetry to rural folks in libraries, public schools, and occasionally in the shadow of a dried-out gully. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, AGNI, Boulevard, Salt Hill Journal, ZYZZYVA, wildness, New Letters, and the Florida Review, among other places. She is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025).