Stefanie Kirby
I’m Told the Uterus Has a Mouth
These things contradict themselves: you have no tongue. You don’t have a second tongue, either, & it unwinds to get farther from the first tongue you don’t have. It doesn’t stop. You don’t have a single eye next to your exit wounds, deep set as entry points for light like the eyes you don’t have. You might not have a twisted throat or teeth, but nothing is missed more than the mouth you have, filled with absent tongues.
Stefanie Kirby lives and writes along Colorado’s Front Range. Her debut chapbook, Fruitful, is the winner of the 2023 Adrift Chapbook Contest, forthcoming from Driftwood Press. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and appear in The Massachusetts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincinnati Review, SAND, wildness, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.