Poetry By Kimberly Burwick

      Ben Seidelman



Lavender – a woolheart, a wildeat, all soil
in one pure word – as in: being weaned,

as in: the milk-of-the-dead is the dead,
as with cows, mothers, stages of wheat:

seedling, tillering, boot-swollen
before early milk, early dough,

losing green color, the brightwall
of bastard veins in a brassy wind,

you see a deer and say it’s a she
I know how a girl deer ruins the apples

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Your condition – I limit myself to the terror

of quail almost indentured
to harmony, the grind of sunrise

like an abrupt return to the steadiness
of size, layout what is light and which artery

is Lord, so large – use this winter to still
all winters, geometrically we are flushed

and sudden and nothing but acres

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Kimberly Burwick is the author of five collections of poetry, the latest of which is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press (2019). She was born and raised in Massachusetts, and now resides in Moscow, Idaho. She is currently Clinical Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University.