STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
KATELYNN HIBBARD
All that morning, the gulls pooled in odd places, scraping their pale fingers on the cashmere lamp of the earth. Inside my lightning all the women smile, their furious lips hoarding spoons like a late martyr who dances in her one good dress, raining broken on the sand. Now you with your weird silence, bleeding the hours empty while the refrigerator stutters ice into your glass. The women rock my sunrise like a wheat field trapped in a closet. Like the shoes you wore just once and that was after you left me for dead. Like a fistful of God shimmering her ghost on the ceiling.
Aromatic perennial, evergreen creeper,
you thrive in dense shade yet tolerate the sun.
Brought to this land by brewers and healers, you escaped
cultivation, survived mower and rake. You feed
the pinewood mason bee, take over my lawn, choke
out bergamot and blazing star, those native flowers
I cultivate in vain. There will always be more of you
than I can ever remove, and yet
you are my favorite weed to pull. I love
that it must be done slowly, a gentle urgency
in the fingers, a little tug to release your runners,
knowing how firmly the earth is holding you
from first snow melt to first snow fall, o ground ivy,
field balm, catsfoot, alehoof, run-away-robin.
KateLynn Hibbard’s books are Sleeping Upside Down, Sweet Weight, and Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Some journals where her poems have appeared include Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience, she teaches at Minneapolis College and lives with many pets and her spouse Jan in Saint Paul.
