You carry a spool
against your empty
body, fill yourself
with straw, & hope
to hatch something
blameless. Nothing
takes hold, so
your insides twist
the straw to gold
thread. You\u2019ll pull
strands out of
your mouth, wind
the spool: small
sun, body loaded
with gold. Enough
for your empty
nest, glittering home
spun of fire.<\/p>\n\n\n
Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful<\/em> (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest; Remainder<\/em>, forthcoming from Bull City Press; and Opening<\/em>, forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press. Her poetry has been included in Best of the Net<\/em> and Poetry Daily<\/em>, and appears in West Branch<\/em>, Pleiades, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, the minnesota review, <\/em>and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado\u2019s Front Range with her family. You carry a spool \/ against your empty \/ body<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Bluesky: @msstefaniekirby.bsky.social<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"