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after-midnight umbra

Jill Kitchen

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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.

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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, The Dodge, Four Way Review, HAD, The Iowa Review, Split Lip Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, trampset, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on her first collection.

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