Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: A fellow MFA student whose wife was pregnant once told a group of us that the uterus is the strongest muscle in the body. We were appropriately impressed. I’ve learned since that others (the jaw, the soleus in the back of the calf) are also the strongest, depending on how you’re measuring strength, but the uterus in labor stands alone as a muscular marvel. Stefanie Kirby’s extended exploration of this organ goes beyond that scenario, complicating our sense of a part of the body often linked just to reproduction. I love how the division of the title and the first line creates multiple meanings and how the poem’s sentence fragments pace its syntax.
To hear Stefanie read the poem, click below:
The Uterus Belongs to the Family
of bag hollow organs built for stretch and storage. Elastic.
Muscular. Pear-shaped, the uterus is not a room. Is not be-
spoke, not a wheel, not full as a moon. Not an emergency
anymore. In a uterus: a set of keys. Ask me what I’ve got
to unlock. Ask me what else is inside: this spooling chain-
link fence, a buried spade. A knife for paring fruit or carving
anything hollow. A chest with enough drawers to store winter
layers. A tidal flood. Tomatoes brought in green from outdoors.
Salt meant for curing. When I say cure, I mean the opposite:
always short of preservation. I can tell this so many ways
but it always ends with loss, in a body that wants to be full.
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 Passages North, Stonecoast Review, wildness, Faultline Journal, The Moth, The Offing, and elsewhere.
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