the locust tree is dying. my love noticed it first. i could see no difference between the pair, their ruffle of green feathers against the june light. maybe a crack in the bark, but what tree trunk doesn’t split against the forever burn and freeze of colorado? there are always things he’s known first, felt somewhere inside him where the knowing is. like that we were going to have a son, dreamt him exactly as he is now, not the daughter i was so sure of as i smoothed the silk of my globing belly. like when he knew he had to escape a car in the middle of nowhere long island that wasn’t taking him to the airport, the driver unresponsive, eyes straight ahead despite his shouts. i wasn’t there but i hear the heavy thud of his run, breath slicing out of lung, heart thrumming into ears. how he’s always known how to save us, brakes bracing hard in a wyoming blizzard just before our heads would have vanished beneath the metal wall of semi-trailer screeching toward us across a sheet of ice. and one july, after a scatter of seasons, he cried out for the midwife before my body had even hit the ground, his voice cracking into tree bark as i slipped out of my skin like smoke.
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Jill Kitchen’s work appears in Poet Lore, The Shore, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Ecotone, HAD, Parentheses Journal, The Penn Review, Pidgeonholes, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she can be found roller skating on the creek path searching for great horned owls.