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September 14, 2026

Two Aviaries

Stefanie Kirby

Aviary

Afternoon lifts

from the brick.

Birds cool

in the oven,

song rolling

their tender glass

eyes. One pulls

a lightbulb from

under its wing.

 

We clap. 

 

There’s sadness

to it, this elegy lit

in the crumpled dark.

 

 

 

Aviary

A suitcase drops onto the sand packed with flightless birds. 

We button up our green velvet gloves. Each bird we touch 

 

turns into shimmering fingers in the twisted desert 

light. Emptied, the suitcase flickers. It flames. It flies.

Stefanie Kirby is a fan of birds and the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest; Remainder (Bull City Press, 2025); Opening (Glass Poetry Press, 2026); and Aviaries, forthcoming from Rinky Dink Press in 2027. Her poems appear in Best of the Net, Poetry Daily, West Branch, Sixth Finch, The Shore, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.

 

 

 

I used two constraints to shape these poems. The first is structural: 40 words or less. The second involved content: each poem had to feature an aviary, which I defined (loosely) as any container filled with birds. Dean Young wrote, “WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES,” and I thought it might be interesting to make the birdcages, after all. That, and maybe I just wanted a couple of tiny poems about birds in weird containers? For a time, that felt really helpful when I sat down to write.