Stefanie Kirby, featured in the Ocean State Review

In her poem “Allegory With Walls,” Stefanie Kirby creates a deconstructed fable that “instructs”
through inversion and collapse. A woman / wolf diminishes or imagines herself into a house of
matchsticks, or bones—a house constructed through complete loss in the way that bones lose all
trace of flesh when boiled. We learn that even being swallowed alive means feeling pangs of
hunger and the wolf wants to starve herself, stay put, and become an entity removed from the
complicated hungers of her fragmented landscape. With frankness and concision, the poem asks:
Where does a woman go to become a portal?
—Mary Robles, Poetry Editor

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from Volume 14 of Ocean State Review

Allegory with walls

woman approaches a house as a wolf. A house of sticks
stacked like bones, bones lit like matches or shelved along
walls to dry. To house these bones demands loss, nothing left
in a vat that chews the flesh off with heat. Even swallowed
bodies growl their hunger. The wolf blinks once inside.
The wolf won’t eat. The wolf won’t turn and run, won’t bluster
her way through the walls, won’t explode from those bones like
a sun. The wolf wants to be a woman or window, a throat
unlatched by living.

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Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and Remainder, forthcoming from Bull City Press. Her poetry has been included in Best of the Net and Poetry Daily, and appears in West Branch, phoebe, The Massachusetts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.