2 poems

by Kirsten Ireland

twenty twenty

I look like he, 

but sound like she. 

It confuses people 

when my wife says

the baby 

she gave birth to 

has my eyes. 

why

I’m struggling,

at this point anyway, 

to understand 

exactly what happened. 

Rereading words 

nearly twenty years 

old and dead, 

I found honesty 

and happiness. 

I feel it still now, 

that truth 

and that warmth, 

but from a distance. 

I can’t say 

that it is diminished, 

just a different shape 

and I, as you, 

still don’t know why. 

Kirsten Ireland is a visual artist, musician, and longtime writer who currently resides in Illinois with her wife and children. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies such as, Shared Words, and Warps in the Tapestry.