by Martha Young
Vassalisa’s grandma in the tale says Give the doll a snack
and it will help. I flip the doll’s head open. Out hops
a crow. Flip the crow’s head and the starling stuck
inside flaps into sight. The Vedanta Sutra says the inner
self is a person the size of a thumb. Maybe starling
is to crow what grandma’s little doll is to Vassalisa:
inner companion, counsel, the voice that says Listen.
Listen, my grandmother said with her eyes—the tunnels
of her sockets, skin stretched over bone. Two months later
she was gone. The crows recover from their plague
to plague the songbirds. Sparrows settle in the sash
of my daughter’s window. Robins build on the porch.
Summers my child self slept in the curve
of my grandmother’s back, building on her body.
Martha Young’s poem “Interior” won the 2026 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, selected by Victoria Chang, and her work was long-listed for the 2026 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest. She has received five grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the MVICW. The Bridport Prize and the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Contest have recognized her work, which has appeared in Poetry Daily and in online and print literary journals.