In Which No One's Swallowed
Materialized by Stefanie Kirby on Monday, September 22nd 2025.
The bridge collapses. A whale waits, eager as sin. A spectacle, the aluminum sky churns above us. None of us swim, so we close our eyes. The quilted sea folds into itself like a second skin, an oblivious savior. Chin up, it says, there’s nothing left to devour.
Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest; Remainder, forthcoming from Bull City Press; and Opening, forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press. Her poetry has been included in Best of the Net and Poetry Daily, and appears in West Branch, Pleiades, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.
Other stars in the Whale asterism:
The Old Village Brings Memories
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo
& i, light as a dry log, would take down cocoa pods, / guavas, bananas, & green mangoes. / & back in the kitchen, she would be there
Katsu
David Capps
When in Spring semester the breeze from cherry and apple blossoms would blow through the classroom he was first to sense it, and by the wordlessness of his example garnered participation points.
silica
Emily O Liu
I have an impression, deep green: silicon chips bearing microcosm cities, projecting glitter onto a plastic heavens.
For Clark
Eden Petri
EALÁT
Shalini Singh
Only in an American pool, did I find myself floating like a leaf baying— what a beautiful thing it is when you drown yourself and come up, a dolphin more, less human.
The Waiting Room At The End of the Universe
Veronica Tucker
Children here sometimes age in reverse. I once saw a toddler fold into an old man between triage and discharge.
babel
Laura Walker
At first we kept close track of each unspent word, watching our hoard grow and grow, building more boxes and stacking them higher and higher, full of the unsaid, but always close at hand in case we needed them.