Keverlee Burchett
Keverlee Burchett earned her B.A. in English from College of Charleston and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Poetry from Purdue University. She has taught writing courses at College of Charleston and the Art Institute of Charleston, and taught in and directed the Poets in the Schools program for Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts. She now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is an adoption counselor for the Asheville Humane Society.
Along the River, Winter
It's barely enough to catch a squinted eye,
the snow not crystals or flakes but swathes, of what material
is immaterial, since it's nothing you'd recognize,
you'd barely stop to look. And the road, if you could call it that,
cuts ragged through white as if the driver
changed his mind, reversed, found
a new course, headed for the barn on the bank,
slipping along hidden frozen puddles,
lifting his foot from the gas gently, slowly,
not stomping on brakes but letting his truck
slide a little, no harm in losing a little bit of ground,
no hurry around here, no traffic, hardly a soul
to pass in the veil of near-purple light,
and hardly anything to rush home to, this place
where going is doing, where between
is actually the place to be, better than the place left
or to come, though what's to come
is river, water rushing over stones and ice chunks,
broken branches rising jagged from waves
cold and sharp as glass, water that burns but you just have to touch,
can't let it slip by unacknowledged, unfelt, unhurt.