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, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.

TWO POEMS by Stefanie Kirby

Brunette woman (Stefanie Kirby) with short hair and a blue shirt grins at camera.

Deus Ex Machina

The cliff signals like a lonely mouth.
No one remembers to build a machine
that will save us. How heavy it is
to carry each feather and bone toward
this cliff. Each owl a flame, too hot
to draw into the body, so much of it
escapes. Chaos ensues like a
talon-less drum. When I wake up, the
owls that are my daughters blink,
blink    off and on like flashlights.

 

Division

A stone splits into birds, the birds
into daughters, the daughters into gold

under my tongue. My tongue,
a bridge. Which is to say, I open

my mouth to lay an egg. Or, I can build
something with enough birds

in my hands. I lay another egg, a new world
broken like stone or daughters, golden
bodies split into wings.

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