Victoria Spires

My homunculUs

The deal was good. Twenty years of hiding
behind youth’s lazy alchemy, in exchange

for the new; sensation; desire. Bodies
intermingling like base metals. I never wanted

anything noble, just an easy method to waylay
time. For her, it's harder to say. She looks out —

curses all she surveys. She pulls her strings, her
levers, but the contrivances fail. We are

each other's best enemy. Once more she smiles,
through my ravaged face.

Prunus Persica

I have come to think of myself as a discarded
peach: the pitted feeling of the world made flesh.

Youth was the pinch and release of tree, hands,
teeth; summers of lingering deliquescence.

Age is a slow spoil into vinegary distinction.
I was once a peach. I miss it all: the sun's hot breath

in my ear, insisting: eat and be eaten. The fuzz
of grass on skin. The certainty of tasting sweet.

Victoria Spires lives in Northampton, UK with her family. She has been published in iamb & The London Magazine, among others. She was commended/shortlisted in the following competitions: Ledbury, TPW Prize, Aesthetica Arts, Artemesia Arts, Plough Prize. She came Third in the Rialto Nature & Place Competition 2025 and won the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize 2025. Her debut pamphlet Soi-même is available from Salo Press.

Victoria wrote the following about her poems:

Two poems about the female body, and ageing. Both, I think, are trying to play with ideas of surface and what's beneath, and in both there is a somewhat candid confrontation with self. I have always been fascinated with homunculi, and in 'My Homunculus' I thought it would be interesting to leave some ambiguity about which 'self' is the one in charge. 'Prunus Persica' is a kind of requiem for the summers of youth, written with perhaps a last squeeze of defiance before the years of 'vinegary distinction' set in for good.