Jill Kitchen
Image by Osman Arabaci from Pexels
Jill Kitchen's work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, FERAL, HAD, The Iowa Review, Lumiere Review, The Night Heron Barks, Parentheses Journal, The Penn Review, Pidgeonholes, Poet Lore, The Shore, Tahoma Literary Review, trampset, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado but still dreams of New York streets. Twitter: @jillkitchen Instagram: @msjillkitchen https://linktr.ee/jillkitchen
burn
all that's left of you is mountain dust, carried by wind from a 14,000 foot
climb of angled peak. i wasn't there. no bones left underground, waiting
to be found centuries ahead by children in an unknowing backyard,
by the mud-spackled trowel of archeologist, by hands and canid paws
that can't help but dig. when i look east out my window at that line of flat
high plain, i see your shadow. i see the girl of you before the cowboy told you
the news, when still a whole world could be contained in tree-less prairie,
when all that you knew and were was wild, still unmolded by man.
the laughter and tangle of sisters, the patience it took to fill an old cigar box
with rattles, the feel of sweating horse flank beneath palm, beneath cheek.
what light spears must have spilled from your chest in knowing you could
climb onto this near machine of animal and let her carry you wherever you
wanted, this burn of independence and your own muscle of heart strength
as you leaned and whispered your dreams into the flame of pointed ears.
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©2023 Iron Oak Editions LLC
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© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
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