Poetry / M.K. Foster
:: Annunciation ::
for the rare sighting of the white stork in Northern Ireland Lately arrived on the Annadale Embankment, our stork is supposed to be in North Africa, but has found his way here to Belfast from Downpatrick, from County Down, from Donegal, come all this way to our Mouth called River— and Behold! there he is, as foretold like prophecy, like psalm: aye there he is, lads, just like the Reddits said, see how he poses like he knows he is glorious, see how he puffs and plucks the ruffled shirt of his cumulonimbus plumage, an avian Liberace, he’s gorgeous, he is! and good with children and pets, so good to let us gawk and squawk, flap and fumble for our phones as though we could show what is becoming of us these days; what is becoming of us these days? we think to, but don’t ask as we wish him the good luck we wish for, even as we break with aching to know: is this it for us, will it be long now, will it hurt? we wonder how, of all we don’t have, we are so lucky that he’s come to be with us on our last day of sun before the rain takes hold again; we wonder if he is named for a number on his ankle, missing from a menagerie, clawed free from a collection, escaped and thriving and brutally alive with waking and wanting to Behold! the only kingdom which is only the living river between all things where we wonder if he’s on holiday, like he just wants to hang about the Ormeau Road and hold out for Tesco biscuits; we wonder if he just wants to be admired by all we cannot feed him and don’t, anymore than we can feed ourselves in this era haunted by hunger; and we are, so we do: Behold! how we’ve left homes and desks, kitchens and offices, how we’ve all but burned everything we don’t need to witness an omen, how we’ve thrown it all down, thrown open our doors, and run to the river to lose ourselves and seek and find: Behold! people up and down the road abandoning cars like a second coming we couldn’t see coming until it was all we wanted, apocalyptic with longing for the rapture of a seven-foot wingspan of light and dark and beautiful terror: we, the awakened, wandering, until the other drivers have to slow and shout Jesus who died?! All of us is the answer we can barely breathe, much less conjure as speech for how much we love this wild thing immediately when we can barely bring ourselves to touch ourselves like the holy creatures we are, like holy smokes, holy fire; holy shit, I could stand here all day, my friend calls as he calls everyone he knows to share this scene, this monstrum, this beacon, that they may believe as we, tap the holes in their screens, Behold! this blazing body unseen since the 1400s when a mated pair nested in an Edinburgh cathedral; now, wouldn’t that be a sight, we say, to see her, the one he seeks; and it is at once the only love story I believe: this bird crossing time on fire with divine hunger, as we hold ourselves to hold ourselves back from falling to our knees, a feeling I can’t shake even as I turn and return along the Lagan to honor what can be honored while I’m here and thirsty in a way the river can’t break, but a miracle can; it’s a sign, some say, it’s the climate, say others; it’s a sky too hot to lie in, even stripped down and laid bare; it’s desire, I think, which is only transfiguration, which is only the other side of something that was unbearable until it wasn’t: aren’t we all? I think, watching kingdom-come coming closer, winged eyeliner and wings and legs the color of red giants; or maybe, someone says, new beginnings: yes! can’t we just see it? we have to, we must, we know it like salt and bone, there: Behold! a world to be that wants nothing, but to bear the sun on its back—
:: Theia ::
according to a theory called the giant-impact hypothesis,
our Moon had a mother
there is nothing left of her—
this long-ago woman: the striking
body of a disrupted planet
crashing before the beginning
of all things into the Earth
and birthing the Moon,
only then to bury herself
under the bald, scalded
milk skin of her child—
there is nothing left of her
because she is everywhere—
in space, this is obliteration,
on Earth, we call it otherwise—
on Earth, we say,
the daughter is violence
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Annunciation”: It was a rumor that became a quest that became a sign. In May 2025, I was roped into an impromptu journey through my new hometown of Belfast in search of a sight 600 years in the making. “A stork?” I repeated to my friend as we clipped through the Botanical Gardens. “A stork!” he confirmed, “A real stork!” And for all the sense it didn’t make as we sped up to cross the Kings Bridge, it was all the reason there was to turn onto the Annandale Embankment and believe, alongside dozens more, in what we were seeing: A stork. A real stork. This rare, huge, magnificent creature arrived out of nowhere, called the city of Belfast together on the banks of the River Lagan, and gave us all, near and far, a vision that we are not forgotten in this dark epoch of the world, that wonder and beauty live on, and that miracles that reteach us how to see still come to us when we aren’t looking.
“Theia”: Excerpted from my manuscript, Pleurotomaria, “Theia” speaks from a lyric continuum of poetry consumed by visceral elisions between deep geologic time, deep memory, and the female body. Sung as a polyphonic voice across time, distance, and mineral, flora, and animal bodies, each poem is, at once, excavation, exhumation, resuscitation, reclamation, and prophecy—singing as early as the birth of the Moon, calling to the stars as late as tonight, refracted and beheld in a single female body before atomizing into a myth of days to come.
M.K. Foster is a poet, fiction writer, and historian of science from Alabama. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Best New Poets, and elsewhere in the US, and Skylight 47, Crannóg, and The Apiary in the UK and Ireland. In 2024, she was named a MacDowell Fellow in Literature and selected for the 2025 Fulbright US Scholar Award in Creative Writing to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In Fall 2025, she will be abroad as a Maison Dora Maar Fellow in Ménerbes, France. For monsters, fairytales, and more, please visit: marykatherinefoster.com.