Stefanie Kirby
Window Ode II
A woman admires windows in an empty field. Each window holds a daughter she had or a daughter she didn’t: identical in snowy shifts, mouths filled with heat and eyes marbled with flame, features chiseled against their frames. The woman wants to tell the living apart from the rest, but even their tears are the same. In chorus, the daughters’ weeping sweeps a river at the woman, boatless as stone. The windows shut. The river mouth dries, wipes its eyes, turns to yolk. The woman laughs, finally! Something to feed her empty daughters.
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.