Womb Study with Mouth & Walls by Stefanie Kirby
Associate editor Lauren Sparks on today’s bonus poem: In “Womb Study with Mouth and Walls,” Stefanie Kirby connects and collapses bodily and mental experience, resulting in a poem that examines how we see, create and how we lose hold. Kirby’s images condense immense experiences into sharp, tight lines that consider what it looks like—despite decay and loss—to remain.
Womb Study with Mouth & Walls
A birthing body can dilate
like an eye, the iris a muscle relaxed
& open to the light. Can open a mouth
ready to drink in tides made relentless
by time. Consider the womb in ebb:
no longer residential, a windowless
shell. The best ruins remain
unforgiving, their brick carved
into a lidless eye. The best ruins
form an inverted pear, ripe
or otherwise: a piecemeal build.
I’m told hysteria grinds against
similar walls. Unripe. Decay
in ongoing collapse.
Stefanie Kirby is a Pushcart nominated poet residing along Colorado’s front range. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Rust+Moth, DIALOGIST, Clockhouse, and elsewhere.
