iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I still can’t quite believe I have a poem in this magical issue of Alaska Quarterly Review behind this gorgeous cover photograph. Many thanks to Ronald Spatz for including my work in these pages. (Photo taken beneath the magnolia tree where I wrote “a sudden chorus”.)

Image a hand holding the Summer & Fall 2026 issue of AQR Alaska Quarterly Review beneath a magnolia tree with a photograph close-up of plants and succulents and blueberries

Image of the Table of Contents of the AQR Alaska Quarterly Review Summer and Fall 2026 issue

Jill Kitchen
a sudden chorus
magnolia leaf like a shield like a dress you could make into armor into a crown to keep off the unwanted advances of ice storm
fiber thick enough to eat to line your gut to make a home a shelter even a width of blanket woven with the flex & bend
of honeysuckle vine the kind that sings virginia sweet not the red spears you planted in colorado that waited
until you were leaving to bloom to salute the sad curl of avocado grown from seed during early days of pandemic
suddenly surprised to find itself in high altitude & winter after being born into fruit in mexico does the cherry tree
remember how you held her caressed the soil at her edges wondered over her white summons of flowering her june of cherries

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It’s so lovely to welcome October with two new prose poems in the lovely fall issue of @westchesterreview.bsky.social So grateful to the editors for including my work, two poems very steeped in my the woods of my childhood in Westchester County. Listen to me read both at the links in my bio.

Cover art collage with leaves and birds from the Fall 2026 issue of The Westchester Review.

Image of a willow tree with the text Jill Kitchen and Listen.

what you still carry with you

by jill kitchen

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

The Westchester Review
A Literary Journal
cluster by Jill Kitchen
reach of basil lush and wide already hardening because winter is just about to touch us like the willow tree that used to touch ground in new york state in the neighboring yard where i longed to swing on a gathered grasp of branches but could only cross the stone wall when the neighbor's small feisty granddaughter was visiting the one who shouted you're not my father whenever my dad asked her not to do something like touch the wisteria or throw wet clumps of leaves at the window and so instead we swung our small shapes on the lengths of willows ran to my mother's lilies of the valley against the stacked stone wall the girl bowed over touching the tiny white cups with her fingers while i hovered in the side of her eye in case she felt more like destruction that day like

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Waiting for a response to my poetry submission that is at 397 days and counting...

Grey kitten sitting on stairs in a silly human-like position with legs pointing straight out.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Thrilled to have two poems in the latest lovely issue of @birdcoatquarterly.bsky.social. Thank you to Anna Sandy Elrod for choosing "fade" and "on wind", both writings from my Colorado heart.

Image of the cover of the latest issue of Birdcoat Quarterly featuring a piece of art with a blue circle with blue lines crossing it

on wind
Jill Kitchen
she catches at my edges, lifts me to noticing. she carries crow to where he needs to go, his crackled call. she sings the grey center of a sunlit cloud, leans into green. without her, no one would dance. the finches would still, unruffled. she reminds you to move, even if it is only with the wings of your heart. she guides the song of the boy on his bicycle, te quiero te quiero. the crow again, a caw of lament, a drum in throat. have you ever swallowed gold, the thread of autumn light? the rustle touch of grass, the sound of ocean where there is none. within her touch, the memory of other times she surrounded. a montana plain haunted by ghost shadow. the cornish coast near tintagel. the cliffs of west maui, carrying wave crash over black rock. how she is everywhere, holding you, summoning you elsewhere, raging at you. once, she showed you how she could miracle 80 degrees and sun spears into 20 degrees and a brutal blue snow cloud, erasing everything. she carries the voices of the lost to their mothers, carries the cries of the grieving back to spirit walkers. exhales seeds across a continent, hearts across oceans. the coyote's split arc of howl in the night.

fade
Jill Kitchen
the goldfinches have gone. the rise and fall, rise and fall of their flight. sunflowers have lost their color, leaning brown and petal-less into
the sudden lesser light of late afternoon. every creature seems to be fighting against winter's sure arrival-the jays and red-breasted finch arguing
with a squirrel over the last of the scattered seeds, a cottontail worrying over sweet remnants of flesh left on windfall cores from the apple tree. the same tree
a bearshape crunches in the almost-midnight dark, the pull and crackle of leaves on the branch, the persistent snap of teeth breaking through apple skin.
even your child hungers and wanes with each moment's loss of light. even you are fading, your shadow become the soft murmurs of leaf shapes,
the sun sighing small geometries in between. it isn't only this season that pulls you away. this story has been spinning for years, since
your absence of breath to become mother. since even before, when you began to fear the predators who might find you the day your own skin
shook you unconscious and left you on a taxi floor, the ghost songs of sirens closing in.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

So ridiculously excited to have two poems in the first issue of @forgetcool.bsky.social, a rad new online journal with an awesome zine feel brought to you by @mfitejohnson.bsky.social and @allisonwrites.bsky.social. Thank you so much to these fab humans for including my work! forget.cool/issue-1/

crush
it was neon lights in a strip mall, the flame of red letters
on yellow, big gulps bigger than a teenage torso

clove cigarettes stubbed out against the humid
virginia night, mosquitoes & the breathing dark

waiting to creep in against mostly empty parking lots
against the stir & sweat of all of us who couldn’t wait

for the clock to touch midnight so we could count out
our cash drawers & get back in our cars to crank music

we bought with slow-earned cash & employee discounts
to head somewhere other to basements alone

where we could keep blasting the sound of our still-forming
hearts to a friend’s house where we would smoke cigarettes

& clutch video game controllers or fumble fingers against
instruments to mirror back those same melodies that split into soul

to the backseat of a car where our mouths exhaled into the ear
& neck of another while song our only true crush surrounded us

it was belonging when you weren’t someone
who ever belonged anywhere

Image of smiling teen with long hair, a grey tee and cutoff shorts and a silver ball bell necklace.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Despite these past two rough weeks, I got to ring in the eve of my 50th birthday with @majda.bsky.social and a dear London bestie watching Keanu Reeves in concert with Dogstar last night at the 9:30 Club in DC:

Keanu Reeves playing bass with his band Dogstar

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I could use all of the jokes, silly videos, and pet pictures while parenting a kiddo recovering from a serious trauma. Our silly contortionist kitten is helping when she can:

Grey kitten with white and grey spotted belly asleep belly up with head at a strange angle against someone's legs holding a laptop.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Is anyone still accepting summer-themed poems or prose poems?

Illinois late summer sunset sky with pink cloud-wisps over a double-lamped streetlight.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

So grateful to @katiemanningpoet.bsky.social & @whaleroadreview.bsky.social for including me in the gorgeous & moving summer reading on Saturday. It was such a stunning gathering of voices, I laughed, wept, & was lifted up out of constant overwhelm into a beautiful, connected heartshape of voices.

Screenshot of Whale Road Review reading with the images of 16 readers.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Where are your favorite places to submit work that blurs the lines between prose poetry and flash? (The most relevant image I could find in my camera roll:)

An image of cream-colored blossoms and green leaves of a panicle hydrangea plant leaning over a fence with unstained wooden boards and a bumpersticker that says Hercules beneath a blue sky.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Yay!!! That means it's time to re-watch the Goth episode of The Mighty Boosh:

Two images of Noel Fielding holding up a can of hairspray called "Goth Juice", "the most powerful hairspray known to man. Made from the tears of Robert Smith."

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Happy Friday! Things have mostly been rough, but I was thrilled to wake up to a double acceptance today! And one for a poem that had been declined 33 times.

Image of a forearm and hand holding a glass bottle with two pink peonies from the backyard against a glass paned backdoor

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Here is my poem "when they ask you to name the muse" in @northamerreview.bsky.social (to capture the correct line breaks). So excited that this piece is out in the world, and in such a lovely venue:

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

when they ask you to name the muse

she is a highway stretched across desert night, sleep curving herself around red rock & a single airstream trailer that reflects three-quarter moonlight like a spaceship. she is a song, the way a voice hits microphone in a room alone after midnight, full of a storied truth & beauty no other ear will ever hear. she is the sudden rush of creekwater barreling down mountain after a season without touch, the greening bud on the locust we thought wouldn't last another year. the plum blossom with her bittersweet promise of palm-sized fruit you will not be here to collect. the plush front seat of a 79 buick stuck to the back of your bare legs as you drive through landscape with no one save that one cassette playing over & over, no one to tell you where & when to stop, no one waiting for you, summoning you but the sheer heat of sun, the silver gleam of hood ornament catching light.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I’m so very grateful to the editors of The Vassar Review for including my poem “urgent” in the gorgeous new Temper and Testimony issue. The link to a free downloadable PDF is in my bio. So much beautiful art and language contained within. Spend some time with this issue when you can.

Cover of The Vassar Review's 2026 Temper and Testimony issue, with an an image of a person's bare throat, collarbone, and shoulder beneath dark hair with a pink spaghetti strap.

2026 Contributors:

Fern Apfel・Thomas Beller・Harriet Foreman Bennet・Laura Booth・Megan Cartwright・Abigail Chabitnoy・Carol Durak・Veronica Evanega・William Fice・João Gabriel・Mira Goodman・Gabriella Halas・Andrew Hildenbrand・Tysheema Holmes・Mandy Rogers Horton・Jill Kitchen・Kimia Ferdowsi Kline・Elizabeth Kuelbs・Nathaniel Lachenmeyer・Amber Lelli・Genevieve Mathis・Simone Muench・Laurel Nakadate・Alexander Pham・Magdalena Prado・Gina Ruggeri・Carolyn Schlam・Emma Schwartz・Anna Sones・Piérre Ramon Thomas・Caitlyn Waltermire・Karen Tei Yamashita

Urgent Jill Kitchen

the bee moves softly from one cherry blossom to another, pausing over each
yellow-starred center. she is alone with the tree. i don’t know whether to weep or
rejoice for her and this moment alone with the glint of pollen. i watch her hazy dream
of movement, the whispered magic of wings that carry her everywhere. the field is
greening across the street, the foothills taking on a shire-like hue. all this color and
bright fills everything with the swell-sting of hope. even the bee spills that same
hope, however fragile. though her solitude makes me worry. maybe the rest of her
tribe are only just waking into this colorado may after late and heavy snows. even the
coyotes are beginning to rouse, their evening parties like the urgent chaos
of teenagers in the park. the pups sample their voices, find their ranges–yips that hint at
laughter, high-tinged howls that sound just like a woman screaming. each time, i rush
to the window, squint my eyes into the blue-black, listen hard from throat edges, try
to discern tragedy from jubilation. like when i lived in the city and lifted the window
each night to untangle whether the cries i was hearing were drunken celebrations
outside the bar across the street or that heart-haunting sound that so many women
listen for, tense for beneath centuries of skin

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

If you see this, post a concert photo you took. Nick Cave, 2017, Paramount Theatre, Denver.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Since it's 80 degrees today in DC, where are you sending your summer-themed poems?

Black skates with cherry-cola laces, light up red and yellow wheels, beneath rainbow socks and cuffed blue jeans.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

I've never been more excited for spring's arrival.

Image of pink tree blossoms and branches against a clear blue sky.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

where would you send a sort of southwest / road-trip prose poem starting in a diner?

image of sand-colored boulder formations surrounded by small green shrubs, possibly sagebrush, beneath a mostly clear blue sky, with mountains in the distance

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

how i imagine one builds a poetry collection:

a blue-rimmed white bowl full of blue-purple italian plums surrounded by seeming hundreds of italian plums on a fern-patterned tablecloth.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

once upon a brooklyn apartment, a guitar-strumming girl...

woman with slightly longer than chin length dark red-brown hair covering one side of her face, one green eye showing, posters on the wall behind her.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

This guy really enjoyed Heated Rivalry:

Kitten watching scene from Heated Rivalry on a laptop featuring a hockey player with facial hair and a red jersey, a trophy, and crowds.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Trying to make it through this month.

Image of peach-gold-pink sunset fanning out into blue over a treescape

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

These guys make it really hard to get out of bed:

Woman with light brown hair with eyes closed with tiny grey kitten with eyes closed next leaning against her face.

Buff-colored kitten looking out a window with tail up.

Buff colored kitten reclining in grey cat bed and looking at camera

Grey and white kitten with green eyes looking at camera

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

vibing with this chat support agent

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

OMG, awesome!!! I am hoping for this one:

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

This is mine, I guess I’m as predictable as ever:

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Somedays it helps to know that someone decided to build this in their backyard.

Image of wooden wall/fence and sagebrush with the word LOVE spelled out in large red-painted letters made of wood.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

In case you missed my Brooklyn ghost poem on Halloween, here is "after-midnight umbra" from Boudin's Ticking Clock Issue:

after-midnight umbra

Jill Kitchen

brick brownstone painted red on a busy avenue, top floor open to brooklyn sky. from the roof, a woven
cityscape of other rooftops, other chimneys, the scent of tar. manhattan’s lower skyline small enough to
hold in a hand, catch fireworks in july.

spiral staircase a tremble of iron, sunday goulash at the austrian restaurant on the corner. a bed shared
with a sleeping love and sometimes two cats when they aren’t chasing each other up and down the narrow
staircase, through pink dawn shadows on the floor.

when you are alone, another dark silhouette in the shower, shifting where there should be no shadow.
when your partner is alone looking out the window, a human-shaped reflection behind his own outline.

at three a.m. each night, both bedside lights turn on. some wiring glitch, perhaps.

one october night, a candle long unlit lights itself. you wake to your near-dreaming man standing in
trance, watching the flicker and burn, red shadows on his skin. another night, your long-unwound music
box starts to play musetta’s waltz into the sleeping dark. always as the clock touches three.

your love returns home late one night, ascends the stairs to find you asleep, curved into eyelash flutter,
while both bedside lamps put on a strobe-stuttered light show. your mouth open to a soundless cry.

you start to wake at three a.m. to the sound of a man’s scream in one ear. you think it must be the stress of
work weaving nightmares until your man tells you he wakes that way, too, and often.

you pack to move 2,000 miles away. the night before you leave, your partner wakes to a fist in his face, no
hand in sight. the room a shimmer of shadow mote.

black and white drawing of an analog wall clock with roman numeral numbers.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

It's the marvelous @majda.bsky.social's birthday! Celebrate by purchasing her brilliant collection "In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls" if you don't already have this beauty on your shelves! politics-prose.com/book/9798218...

The cover of Majda Gama's book of poems "In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls"

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

a twilight colorado mountainscape with moon, a few years back.

twilight snow-covered mountainscape with cloud and fragment of moon

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

In case you missed my ghosty poem yesterday in Boudin's Ticking Clock issue, the day after Halloween is a great day to continue your spooky reads! www.mcneese.edu/thereview/af...

Drawing of old clock with roman numerals.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

I had sent a friend her COVID hedge apple:

Hedge apple decorated with cranberries to look like COVID structure

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

This guy had to pause in the tree with his load of snacks after tossing unacceptable acorns onto cars on the street below all day.

Squirrel in tree holding a branch with acorns on it.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

In case you missed my poem "when the world did not feel like a crushing weight" in the beautiful @asteralesjournal.bsky.social:

when the world did not feel like a crushing weight / jill kitchen

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

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

My poem "when the world did not feel like a crushing weight" is best viewed on a phone flipped sideways or on a computer browser. www.asteralesjournal.com/1-4-kitchen-...

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Look what arrived yesterday! Can't wait to dive in to @djvorreyer.bsky.social's beautiful book!

Photo of the book Unrivered by Donna Vorreyer on blue fabric

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Beautiful mail just in from Ireland. Thank you @poetryireland.bsky.social!

Image of a copy of Poetry Ireland Review issue 146 Edited by Stephen Sexton with a jar full of bright colored flowers.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Shadow poem, DC morning light falling across a closet door.

Shadows of morning light fanning out across a door

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