Poetry / Stefanie Kirby
:: Self-Portrait as William Tell as the Mother of Daughters in Post-Roe America ::
I count them all, the daughters I did and didn’t have, the trees they backed against, the apples on their heads, red-cheeked like grief. I count my arrows, monstrous bodies held cold and sleek as bone: each head a mark, my own hand just one way to damage a fruitful body.
::Composition with Wreckage::
An apple is mostly flesh. At night my daughters curl into question marks on their beds. Punctuated by holes, a body retains little except need. A better version ends with an egg split on a sidewalk. I try to say something about luck, but the words I use are leave and hurry.
:: Daughter as Swallowed Goat::
I This body is not what I expect: hooves on my skin like a drum, taut as a pond in a mirror. Almost symphonic, how a body turns on itself like a fracture, cracks from the inside out to release this bleating song.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Growing up in post-Roe America, my daughters have less rights than I once did. In all likelihood, our control over our bodies will continue to erode for the foreseeable future. I worry often about what it means to have produced bodies that will eventually be capable of similar production, to have passed on this burden through a shared bodily inheritance. How can a body be both complicit in and simultaneously react against the cultural and now legal expectations of production? The resulting poems function as my mea culpa, an offering to give my daughters in place of an explanation. Each attempts to trace the guilt I feel as their mother and strives to imagine an exit strategy for them. Maybe the start I’ve made here, within the world of the poem, will help them move forward with the strength they’ll undoubtedly need in the world I’ve asked them to inhabit, in the bodies I’ve made.
Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and Remainder, forthcoming from Bull City Press. Her poetry has been included in Best of the Net and Poetry Daily, and appears in West Branch, phoebe, The Massachusetts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.