Panhandle | The Iowa Review

Kimberly Burwick

We marry and watch for
the kind of fog
we knew back in tobacco fields.
Put the fish in garlic
and curry while the coconut oils
soak into other vegetables.
Surely there is a cathedral rotting
somewhere in a greener rain,
but no red birds and it’s
the red and steaming feathers
you need for the heart to settle into
its untaught center.

KIMBERLY BURWICK’S second collection of poems, Horses in the Cathedral, won the 2010 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Anhinga Press (2011). Recently she was awarded the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize and the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from the journal Poetry International. She teaches for Washington State University and lives in Moscow, Idaho.