when i belonged to no one
by Jill Kitchen
watermelon and moonshine. horseshoes heavy in my hand. i’ve written this before. back then, i smoked cigarettes. back then, i wore a tight black tanktop with high school hellcats in bright red letters. i drove west to where the horses were. danced flamenco, the voice of a thousand nails coming from my feet. i dyed my hair the color it was in dreams. my grandmother was still alive, but i didn’t call her enough, didn’t see her. my veins still pulsed with the rhythm of new york streets, though i lived in a virginia basement. i stayed up late singing into a silver vintage microphone. my grey cat sang with me, his voice captured somewhere on a stack of unlabeled cds and cassettes, though now he sleeps forever in a colorado garden. back then, i made my own choices. didn’t follow anyone anywhere. slowed down only if i liked the look of someone, let their softness fill a night or a few, warm these edges of skin. back then, i had a body that didn’t fail me. i ate watermelon slices on a virginia back porch, juice spilling down bare arms, into the creases of my jeans. i spat seeds into grass, drank moonshine in ball jars by a pond after midnight, anchored to earth by that muscle of leg, that ripple of horseshoe, the silver clank as i made my mark.
Jill Kitchen's work appears or is forthcoming in The Dodge, Ecotone, The Iowa Review, Lumiere Review, MQR Mixtape, The Night Heron Barks, Parentheses Journal, The Penn Review, Poet Lore, Tahoma Literary Review, trampset, Up the Staircase Quarterly, West Trade Review, 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