when the world did not feel like a crushing weight
Jill Kitchen
The Darkest Shadows
Susan Barry-Schulz
in the black & white picture from the photobooth, we are laughing
to near tears, showing all of our chins. i can hear our snorts, see my hand
over my mouth. we didn’t feel steamrolled by the world then, did we?
not in that moment anyway. when did it shift? last night i dreamt
i was in montana again, 17 years old, about to start a 20-mile hike
uphill in the rain. i panicked to prepare, wrapping changes of clothes
in plastic, liner socks beneath the thicker wool, bandaids for the inevitable
blisters. sleepless in the tent because every raindrop was a bear, the bear
we had hidden our food from, trail mix & potato chips wrapped & hung
high in a tree. i had left my doc martens behind along with most of my CDs.
did i really see the trail, the way the sky hinged into cloudmist? did i know
then what a wonder it was to have a body that could climb & heave, plod
through any climate, sweat & breathe & carry on? i did not know yet.
all i knew was hunger and to follow the beat of footsteps ahead of me.
Jill Kitchen is a poet living in Washington, D.C, though her heart can still be found in Colorado, New York, and London. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best Small Fictions and appears in Crab Creek Review, Four Way Review, HAD, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, Split Lip Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, trampset, and elsewhere. She is at work on her first collection. Find Jill on Instagram, BlueSky, or her website.
Susan Barry-Schulz is a first generation Estonian-American poet and visual artist who grew up just outside of Buffalo, NY. Her work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards and has appeared in SWWIM, The Westchester Review, Rust & Moth, SoFLoPoJO, and in many other print and online journals and anthologies. Find Susan on BlueSky here.