National Poetry Month : Alice Burdick,

Care package

I used to care, but those were in the free

days, the ones between the named

days, the ones without numbers

and holidays. The way it went was:

a person walked across an invisible border,

through gullies, ditches, other dips in the land.

Weather was brutal, its length meant cold

took fingers. That guy in the news knew

the story went only to the end of care. Past that,

fingers fell, care rolled up the rim, and the charter

bus rolled back to the land of the free.

The wolves curled up under cold

trees and learned the sound of no-howl,

no-growl, their minds loud with the crackle

of celestial sheets of light. Their care

made sound go underground, into tunnels

of ears and animal minds. This is when

care went incognito to the hunters,

but the language in the wolves’ minds grew.

I used to care, but those were in the loud days.

I made it sound worse and better than it was,

and dug a hole under the tree, in the ditch and divot,

and this is where the unnamed held dormant

in the winter snow, pushing down

its seed for the longest, endless hope.

Alice Burdick is the author of four full-length poetry collections, Simple Master, Flutter, Holler, and Book of Short Sentences. Deportment, a book of selected poems, came out in November 2018 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Her work has also appeared in many chapbooks, broadsides, magazines, journals, and anthologies. She has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. She also visits high school English classes as a “Poet In Your Class” through Poetry in Voice/les Voix de la Poésie. She co-owns an independent bookstore in Lunenburg called Lexicon Books.