Stefanie Kirby

Capacities

The potential of          a womb expands with thirst, demands

light.          It claims salt pulled from drought-rings, waits

for the body          to shrink back to its former self

but less.          Womb: bucket, barrel, reservoir. Like basins

drained,          the womb imitates the mouth. The womb

                                                speaks, I know birth

as a form of flight.          The womb rewires itself to become

wind. Winged.          A sound posing as swallows.

Stefanie Kirby lives and writes along Colorado’s Front Range. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and appear or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review’s miCRo, Poet Lore, Stonecoast Review, Passages North, The Moth, The Offing, and elsewhere.