A body that bleeds unprovoked is expected to do other things.
The expectation that some bodies produce fruit. Or a different
kind of production: the body like a city. The body at the center
of the city, red lights ripe as seeds after the flesh falls away.
At the center of the city: the womb, a factory in this city
of smoke. The womb pumps plumes of blood into water to build
a lake. The lake is on fire. The lake spoils. The lake is oil loosed
by this body, the waste of production like ash or light or profit
or rind. At the center of the city: all this fruit that pollutes.
Stefanie Kirby
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 The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Passages North, Faultline Journal, The Moth, The Offing, and elsewhere.
