One day it’s clear how different you are, / how much more you could be. (from “Finding your skin” by Merie Kirby)
This week’s guest writer is Merie Kirby
From Joan Kwon Glass: Imagination has always been an essential part of my own transformation, because if I don’t leave space for magic, why do the hard work of shedding skin and letting go? Merie Kirby, in her selkie poems, offers us a glimpse of what is possible. It’s up to us, and our poems, to lean in.
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From Merie: A selkie is a folklore figure, a seal-woman. In the stories, she often falls in love with a human man, who steals her seal skin to keep her in human form, and hides it. Sometimes she finds it and runs back to the sea, sometimes her children, who are also selkies, find it for her. The selkie speaks to me, not only as an ocean-loving Californian who now lives far inland, but also to broader ideas of displacement, longing, sacrifice, origins, legacy, and womanhood/motherhood. This particular poem speaks to resisting self-knowledge until finding a way to be comfortable with it, which often brings a new revelation, in this case about legacy; in later poems in the series the selkie sees how this legacy manifests in her child, too.
More about Merie: Merie Kirby grew up in California, earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota, and now lives in Grand Forks, ND, where she teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. She has also written operas and art songs in collaboration with composers. She’s online at www.meriekirby.com / IG and Bluesky @ allcheesedinner
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