Begin with the end: my bodycarries you still, like a reliquaryholds death skin to skin, cradleseverything built of bones. Anotherend where insides spill onto a lap:the twist of rib cage, a pelvisflexed. Spineless. Sand gathersinto hills, bellies that line the oceanfloor covered with seagrasstongues. Taste salt. Blood, wherean octopus beats herself againstrocks, consumes her own tentaclesafter birth. This feels familiar: to becomeconsumable, a body in violent decline.A reliquary knows the unreliabilityof soft tissue, a matter of decompositiontime. Beginin the architecture of a wound like thatof a shrine, of shelter: fleeting.
Ruptures
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“Ruptures” from FRUITFUL: by Stefanie Kirby.
Published by Driftwood Press on June 25, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Stefanie Kirby.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest; Remainder, forthcoming from Bull City Press; and Opening, forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press. Her poetry has been included in Best of the Net and Poetry Daily, and appears in West Branch, Pleiades, phoebe, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.
“Stefanie Kirby’s Fruitful is a remarkable lyric sequence about raising children during a pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage. If Chekhov advised that fraught subject matter be written ‘somewhat colder,’ then these expertly-crafted poems must have been written at absolute zero in Kelvin. The effect is a kind of creeping dread that increases with every line we read. A singular imagination, Kirby creates a new world, a world of intimate pain where ‘a wolf made of bees, the fur a soft buzz,’ follows the speaker whose ‘milk rings itself like an ocean” and whose ‘womb stacks / itself into cold, / neat cubes on / the linoleum.’ This poetry just contains the unbearable—though contain it must—for ‘to go under again would be to drown.’”
— Carolyn Hembree, author of For Today
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