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Victoria Spires
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the poet
It's been two and a half years since Victoria Spires began writing, and she thinks eight-year-old Vic would be proud of her for living up to her childhood dream of publishing a book – her debut pamphlet, Soi-même. Shortlisted and commended in several prizes and competitions, including the 2024 Ledbury Poetry Competition, Victoria’s poetry has appeared in Berlin Lit, Dust Poetry, Stanchion, The Winged Moon, The London Magazine and After... In 2025, she placed third in The Rialto's Nature and Place Poetry Competition, and won The Alpine Fellowship's Poetry Prize with her poem I try to model kindness to all living beings, and it's hard. Away from writing, you'll find Vic playing wrestling action figures with her son (The Undertaker is her favourite), running, or crouching down to look at something interesting.
the poems
Artemis of
the Salt Works
(Brine Shrimp)
The way you glide, if glide were both shutter and frame
The way your bodies are a thing that moves, and stays in place
The way you flute eleven simultaneous pairs of legs
The way the space you make is always being rearranged within itself
The way your separatenesses fit, as different imprints of the same feather
The way fucking is – for you – a state of grace, which can be achieved alone, or together
The way you are see-through, like the pleats of time made visible
The way your face, if you have a face, is entirely abstract, beatific
The way you synchronise with light
The way you loop with the aimless precision of a rehearsing figure skater
The way you (the skate) feathers you (the ice)
Your soft lives, that begin and end with swim in one unbroken temporal chain
The way you don’t need to believe in heaven, to describe it
From a train
For a while, only field and
trees – the world pleached,
into a certain frame
of reference by a letterbox
eye. Few things change,
except the particular angles
and location of a pylon,
the rain or not-rain
in this or that envelope
of sky. I expect
this is how some loves
arrive: the head idly
resting at the windowpane,
the almost unnoticeable
re-arrangements
in the interior set
design. Until gradually
it is suggested, that a great
journey is underway, and has
been, for some time.
Mother-Substitute
There are 294 mothers in our solar system
Astronomers are discovering new mothers all the time
The smallest and most distant mothers will no longer be given mythological names
All mothers are mythological
On Earth, claims of the existence of other mothers have not been disproved
My mother is called Lilith
When I can’t sleep, I root for her nipple in the pale flesh of the window
I display a fearful-avoidant attachment style entirely in keeping with her orbital eccentricity
The composition of a mother depends on its distance from its own mother
Some mothers are almost constantly volcanic
Some mothers will never be knowable
To mother means to measure time
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb
Author photo: © Peri Cimen