what you still carry with you

here you are this sunlit morning watching february lift us closer to spring closer to hopes of sugar snap peas with tendrils weaving around anything they can find longing to connect to wrap their tiny arms around other plant friends as they bloom into their own crunch-sweet while spinach rises out of earth in dark green quadruplets while chard grows its rainbow popsicle-colored stalks while you wonder if this year the forsythia will grow into the fairy caves of sun-shaped flowers you hid inside as a child in that backyard in new york state that you still carry with you like a lost sibling the out-breath of pitch pine of dogwood the little corner of garden where your mother showed you how to plant zinnia wild strawberry and marigold the apple tree over the sandbox whose branches tangled and swirled in patterns at first unintelligible to your small child self sitting in the sparse grass over the cement roof of hidden bomb shelter where one day you worked out the language of those limbs and even now that map lives inside you those secrets of how to climb where the tree needed to be touched how she could hold you how you still need her to hold you

JILL KITCHEN

Jill Kitchen is a poet living in Washington, DC, though her heart can still be found in Colorado, New York, and London. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions and appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere.