Stefanie Kirby
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msstefaniekirby.bsky.social
Stefanie Kirby
@msstefaniekirby.bsky.social
3.1K followers 3.8K following 180 posts
Writer. Mom. Xeric gardener. OPENING (Glass Poetry, 2025). REMAINDER (Bull City Press, 2025). FRUITFUL (Driftwood Press, 2024). Poems in Best of the Net, West Branch, phoebe, Cincinnati Review, etc. More poems at https://linktr.ee/stefaniekirbypoetry
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"Day" from Sabrina Orah Mark's THE BABIES (Saturnalia)
DAY The world is, in spite of everything, very over. I asked the carnie, and he said Marvin. And I said yes? And he said Marvin, it's very over. I nodded in agreement, as I rearranged the wisteria. Also, the day was clear. A single silk stocking hung in the air. And the carnie, his hands in his pockets, said Marvin. And I said yes? And he looked at me tenderly and said the dish has run away from the spoon. And I said yes, it was bound to happen. That night, in his orange pickup truck, we made love for the last time, as it sunk into a muddy swamp. Somewhere else, a tree was burning.
July 9, 2025 at 6:11 PM
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Turns out I was wrong...I HAVE ALL THREE (and you can, too)! 🙌
Picture of three books by Frances Klein: I HAVE NEVER WANTED ANOTHER LIFE (TEXT) MESSAGES FROM THE ANGEL GABRIEL THE BEST SECRET
June 27, 2025 at 12:46 AM
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It's a good day when the new South Carolina Review arrives stacked with poems from @cdeskilson.bsky.social, @charles-kell.bsky.social, and @fklein907.bsky.social. Here's Frances Klein's "Funeral Procession Up Deer Mountain," but definitely check out the whole issue if you can!
FRANCES KLEIN Funeral Procession Up Deer Mountain The sun insists on rising too early. Deer Mountain rolls on its foundation, burying its head in a blanket of clouds. Each tree wears a snow shawl, fallen flakes erasing false spring. At the base of the mountain the town is still sleeping. Only the heartbroken rouse to process toward the peak under a crisp ice sky, which threatens more snow, but does not release: a held breath with no exhale. Clouds ripple, shift, block the sun from breaking through, experts in defense. Although the front may yet turn, cold reigns all day. // grief heavies us snow weighing the boughs of cedar trees Cover of South Carolina Review Volume 57.2 / Spring 2025 Cover art by Margaret Smith, "Alien Spaghetti" (2023) Cover art is a painting divided into quadrants with varying background colors: orange, blue, green, pink. Each features several rosettes of coiled lines that mimic plates full of spaghetti twisted into rounds.
May 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM
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Excited to have two poems in the new Lake Effect -- here's "Topography" (from my chapbook REMAINDER, out from @bullcitypress.com's Inch series later this year):
Stefanie Kirby Topography A woman masquerades as the mouth of a river, swallows something that isn't a bird or anchor or flame. The mouth shrinks to the size of a coin. Cold as fish eyes. Something with teeth exits, the sharp of it ready to grow.
May 10, 2025 at 1:20 AM
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Thrilled to have two poems up in the latest Four Way Review! Here's "Deus Ex Machina":
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.
April 30, 2025 at 10:08 PM
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A favorite from Amiri Baraka's THE DEAD LECTURER:
Audubon, Drafted (for Linda) It does not happen. That love, removes itself. (I am leaving, Goodbye! Removes itself, as rain, hard iron rain comes down, then stops. All those eyes opened for morning, close with what few hours given them. With tears, or at a stone wall, shadows drag down. I am what I think I am. You are what I think you are. The world is the one thing, that will not move. It is made of stone, round, and very ugly.
February 12, 2025 at 9:13 PM
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Two poems from the inimitable Nicky Beer's REAL PHONIES AND GENUINE FAKES:
Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944 See how the silver snaps in a lone spot, the sound flirting with coyotes, castrated foghorns, distant siren. Observe how that polished body curves in the strategy of lights, how its voice is like a parody of mourning, and so even more mournful immersed in its high-pitched joke. Admit that some other instrument would fail-wood-honeyed curve, funneled brass-when what's needed now is a tongue with the chill of steel. Watch how the thighs hold that music steady, how the dust and moths draw closer to the song, a song that's dying even as it hovers in the dark, a lost mouth moaning vowels that are too close to your name. Self-Portrait While Operating Heavy Machinery I brandish the chainsaw in the deadgrass field, make it swoop the air in snarling, oily ellipses. From a distance, we look like a convulsing ostrich. The secret about the pills is that they're completely harmless; the real danger is what I'll do when I'm not afraid of anything, The Bureau of My Assured Future Failures placed on furlough, offices shuttered, I Told You So rubber stamps gathering dust, Yes You Can't banner sagged and partially unstrung in the break room. Listen to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played for so long I mistook it for music. I'm crowned with welding sparks as I drape dull jewels of dynamite over the throats of town square statues, as I turn a sliding panel van into my own personal tank. But wait. Let's go back to that field where I'm swinging the chainsaw. Such joyful, hazardous arcs you've never seen. I'm slicing up huge chunks of the sky to stack and burn for the winter, not a single tree left.
February 11, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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"The Sisters as Captains of Industry" from Jordan Windholz's THE SISTERS (Black Ocean):
The Sisters as Captains of Industry They fed pig iron into forges, poured ore into molds, melted and minted their gold. They shrugged at the sweat of the beaters, dabbed their philtrums with silk, blinked and breathed as the chuffs of coal-black smoke seemed to give shape to their capital's invisible rise. They were surprised at how good it felt to be evil, to love the love of money. How benign they seemed because they smiled, had lovely families. In bespoke suits, they posed for portraits that would hang in the future halls of their philanthropy. At breakfast, on their verandas, luxuriating in the life of a dream that dreamed them, they thought how fantastic it was to have hoisted themselves up from nothing with nothing but the helping hand of wealth.
February 6, 2025 at 9:27 PM
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Delighted to have two poems in the latest South Carolina Review!! Here's "Coronary," which will be featured in my chapbook, REMAINDER, out from @bullcitypress.com's Inch series in June!
Cover of Volume 57.1 of South Carolina Review, Fall 2024. Painting of a black cat resting on discarded clothes on the floor of a bathroom. STEFANIE KIRBY Coronary The dead baby pulls out of the body like a fuse, pops its heart into a tent: four-chambered, habitable, soft as a grave. I want to climb inside, but I don't fit despite my shrinking body. The dead baby suggests leaving my shoes outside, but this doesn't help. I take off my hat, my rings, my skin, and sit outside the heart- tent flaps, skinless and howling. What doesn't kill you makes you fold, the dead baby says. Our collapsing bodies push into the night sky, circle above us in arteries of light.
January 16, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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Two poems from @saramoorewagner.bsky.social's excellent LADY WING SHOT:
AT THE ANNIE OAKLEY FESTIVAL, THERE ARE SO MANY TRUMP 2024 BANNERS "I love a gun. I have always loved a gun." -Annie Oakley To love a gun the way I love the water rushing over my shins after a rain when we're children again and we've plugged up the sewers. The world was mine, stuffing old worn towels in every crack. My mother would turn away, watch the rain ping into the water like little stones, and the higher the water, the more it reverberated, the more she could feel it inside her lungs, feel those lungs fill. To love a gun like water, to sit down next to the biggest oak tree on a hot day in June, to put it into your mouth like a glass of water. To let it fix you. To love a gun, to think a gun could clean you or the Earth, could be God's deluge, could bring the rainbow back, the white dove with a branch in beak, the woman at the well, kneeling, and you are there with your gun and she must give you whatever it is you've come for. Because you've come for something, because you must want something. And if I am understanding it as I ought to, it's meant to fill you, cleanse you, keep you, smudge off that smell of chaos which sits in the bend of your empty hands in the morning when they are as neat as a child's, as simple and as holy as Abraham's hands above every lamb, above every boy, above every single wife he stood over like a storm cloud, like a gun. What does it means to hold this in front of me, out to me, to hold this up as an offering to the Lord our God, as an example of a man with power so thick it could blow you apart. WHAT ANNIE OAKLEY KNEW The big yellow moon, strung low above the tree line in the morning, looked like a second sunrise to the girl in the field with her gun, and it said I know what will come. What you intend is never the same as what happens. The flowers push little buds through the muck, have been to the other side of the world and under, where father is laid. There is no rest. And her gun, though it was not living, looked her straight in her hazel eye, coughed a smoke that turned to a meadowlark. I will grow up, said the smoke, leave you out. Tell me what men will do, have done. The Bible says Love Mercy, but not in the same way the earth speaks, or the gun, not by holding her quiet head in its hands. There can be two sunrises, one where a girl is barefoot hunting the last little rabbit to bring home to her widowed mother, and one where the girl is the rabbit and she is older now, working in a gas station or grocery store and bam, open fire. Lineage. What should I the girl says to the chipping bark on the hickory tree, and the cicadas, burrowed deep below, hear her, rise, chirp one loud sorrow she interprets to mean it's coming, no matter what you do.
January 15, 2025 at 6:50 PM
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Revisiting this poem from Radha Marcum's PINE SOOT TENDON BONE (The Word Works).
Fire Season in the West A spotted towhee grips the splintered fence chest red as a controlled burn then flits into wildfire haze -another blaze peppers the membranes of our eyes blurs the yard where I snip stubs of done marigolds and blinking back realize it's ashes I've mistaken for flies eye-floaters it's ashes of others' lives falling to my fore- arms to my restlessness with garden scissors -tonight when the new wildfires lay down in me each anxiety will flash like dry lightning how many acres this season? -crews work to dig the break the line to tamp down sparks as stars wither in the smolder of every engulfed home - though certain groves can burn and survive charred like ponderosas given time I'll forgive the grasses that replace the trees
January 9, 2025 at 9:16 PM
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This is coming up on Wednesday next week! I hope you can join us! Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
GPC's 2024 Online Reading Dec. 18th Start: 5PM PST / 8PM EST K. Mobley Ashley Elizabeth Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi Jacob Jardel Maya Williams Kenny Bradley Leticia Urieta Abigail Frankfurt Stefanie Kirby M. A. Dubbs Guillermo Filice Arushi (Aera) Rege Luka Galle Garden Party Collective
December 13, 2024 at 5:09 PM
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A gem from Ruth Baumann's THORNWORK (Black Lawrence).
THORNWORK RUTH BAUMANN Getting Over Love grows slowly or love says fuck that. Sometimes I stay feeling radical. Sometimes the story I want to tell stresses relief instead of loss. The man is not central. The man is not central. The man is already fading, leaves out of season, the cold cracking them underfoot. I live in a city with no winter, but there is still cold. Sometimes I call this space the clearing, the absence house, & I thank god waiting is no passive verb. Do you hear that? Every bird that's ever flown south for warmth is still flying, still flying, their wings in my head.
December 12, 2024 at 9:29 PM
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A favorite from Zachary Schomburg's FJORDS VOL. 1 (Black Ocean).
BUILDING OF UNSEEN CATS When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair. Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a cat in it. We weren't supposed to have cats in my building, but there they all were, an invisible nation suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said let's never speak of this. Let's not look directly at what is meant to be loved in secret. Let's, for example, imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever spilling toward us, that our screaming building is something worth escaping.
December 5, 2024 at 10:45 PM
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Food for thought from Radha Marcum's PINE SOOT TENDON BONE (The Word Works).
Hidden Narrative Today's headlines enter uninvited, enter and rearrange me as ink focuses my eye. I might as easily read our future in the desiccated hands of cottonwood leaves, in cupped milkweed husks.
December 1, 2024 at 8:41 PM
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Radha Marcum's PINE SOOT TENDON BONE, winner of The Word Works' Washington Prize, is a triumph in dark times.
Book cover with text as follows: Winner of the Washington Prize Pine Soot Tendon Bone Radha Marcum
November 27, 2024 at 4:59 PM
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Another favorite from Sarah J. Sloat's HOTEL ALMIGHTY (Sarabande).
MISERY joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way Text is an erasure in dark green above a tower with a fan shape at its top, which seems to mimic a flashlight and its beam.
November 25, 2024 at 11:17 PM
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A beauty from Sarah J. Sloat's HOTEL ALMIGHTY (Sarabande).
MISERY A little voice was caught in a Well 107 (Text is an erasure set alongside a dark gray blazer filled with colorful circles that seem to spill from the neck, waist, and sleeves.)
November 24, 2024 at 10:48 PM
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Returning to an absolute favorite, the opening poem from Victoria Kennefick's EAT OR WE BOTH STARVE (Carcanet).
Eat or We Both Starve Poems Victoria Kennefick LEARNING TO EAT MY MOTHER, WHERE MY MOTHER IS THE TEACHER Where did I start? Yes, with the heart, enlarged, its chambers stretched through caring. In this body feeling is what the body is. The alert heart, an alarm rings out in all hours of the night, flashing red and white. Oh is it in defiance or defeat, I don't know, I eat it anyway, raw, still warm. The size of my fist, I love it. Strange, a vegetarian resorting to cannibalism. She is disgusted with me. Wouldn't you begin with the outside? Sweating, I pry open the rib cage. I do not want to eat her ribs, but I do. Then strip her fingers of meat. I hold them tenderly in my mouth, watch her blue eyes well-up out of love, I assume. I move from heart, to ribs, fingers, to spongy lungs: buoyant, porous, melt-in-the-mouth. The eyes are tougher than expected, aqueous humour slithers down my throat, A surprise, it's minty. I know what you're thinking, I left the brain. No, not so. I have consumed that organ piecemeal, sweet morsels since my teeth came in, it tastes like the sound of sirens you don't know are screaming until they suddenly stop.
November 22, 2024 at 9:18 PM
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More of "The Future" from Zachary Schomburg's PULVER MAAR (Black Ocean)...
THE FUTURE In the desert, I'm wearing an appropriate hat. There's a long line of people behind me not wearing hats. The first person in line asks me where's everyone's going? I don't know. So I just say I'm going into the middle of the dark. Where are you going? I ask. We were following you, she says. Then you are going into the middle of the dark, I say. She doesn't want to go into the middle of the dark. She's a holding a baby. She tells the second person in line where we're going, into the middle of the dark, but the second person doesn't want to go into the middle of the dark either. The second person tells the third person, who also doesn't want to go into the middle of the dark. No one wants to go into the middle of the dark. But I'm going into the middle of the dark, I say. It was just as true as ever. Where I'm going it is dark. And I'll be right in the middle of it.
November 15, 2024 at 11:43 PM
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Delighted to find poems by @kate-sweeney.bsky.social and @izineh.bsky.social in the latest issue of Pleiades!
Substratum by Kate Sweeney Beach Reading by Issam Zineh Beach Reading by Issam Zineh Cover of Pleiades
November 15, 2024 at 9:02 PM
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Zachary Schomburg has a whole section of poems, all called "The Future," in PULVER MAAR (Black Ocean). They feel oddly comforting right now with their dark humor. Here's one:
November 14, 2024 at 4:10 PM
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Recent faves from WITH DEER (Black Ocean)
October 18, 2024 at 11:11 PM