Contributor's Note
by Sarah Burke
Sarah Burke is the author of a 54-page document that doesn’t know how to be a book.
She lives somewhere. She splits her time between. By day, Burke arranges pixels for money and burns her tongue on ginger tea.
By night, she can’t stop thinking about sperm whales, the rapid click of their speech. Like a door hinge creaking, a radio dial searching the static.
Three weeks ago, her nephew told her the sky is down if you go deep enough. She can’t stop thinking about that either—a crack of blue under miles of crust and mantle, the fire at the core.
Burke’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming. Someday, she would like to write a poem entitled “Two Deer Outside of Paradox, New York.” Maybe it starts with deer and ends with marigolds turning black at the edges.
Maybe the deer stand at the margins of the poem but never enter it. Still, she can feel them staring from the highway grass. Their slender bones. The spark in their hind legs before they leap.
She lives somewhere. She splits her time between. By day, Burke arranges pixels for money and burns her tongue on ginger tea.
By night, she can’t stop thinking about sperm whales, the rapid click of their speech. Like a door hinge creaking, a radio dial searching the static.
Three weeks ago, her nephew told her the sky is down if you go deep enough. She can’t stop thinking about that either—a crack of blue under miles of crust and mantle, the fire at the core.
Burke’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming. Someday, she would like to write a poem entitled “Two Deer Outside of Paradox, New York.” Maybe it starts with deer and ends with marigolds turning black at the edges.
Maybe the deer stand at the margins of the poem but never enter it. Still, she can feel them staring from the highway grass. Their slender bones. The spark in their hind legs before they leap.

Sarah Burke is the author of Blueprints, winner of the 2018 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize. Her poems have received the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the James Wright Poetry Prize from Mid-American Review, and the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize from Swamp Pink. She has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bicoastal Review, Pine Hills Review, Ploughshares, Wildness, and other journals. Burke lives in Pittsburgh and holds an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University. Visit her online at sarahburke.ink.