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Harvests
BY IAN BURNETTE
Runner-Up for the 2014 Adroit Prize for Poetry
Judge: Richie Hofmann
1
We used to play pirates
in an empty field
near my uncle’s house,
the unshy earth
filling our hands
with oil beetles
and the odd penny
spoon—as if she
could resent us
for pulling thorns
from her unreachable
shoulder.
2
Then there was the year
the ocean dried,
an oil man’s angry
turbo diesel scraping
barnacled Dunn St.
into calcium dust,
his slick hair
and the cold metal pen
in my uncle’s hand—
for the lease of the land,
he was promised
yellow gold, a hardy
flower called rapeseed
with canola in its veins.
3
By spring, scintillant bud
rucked our field
like a floodlight, a beam
the color of house clams
or razor flies. Stalks
ate past my uncle’s
hungry waist, sucked
our field jaundice
with open mouths
until three boys from town
took a quiet girl into
the belly of our field
and made her open up.
“Ian Burnette’s ‘Harvests’ is a gorgeous poem of anxiety and violence—a narrative subtly and terrifyingly laid out in simple and exquisite sentences. So much is held in tension, so much is a fingerbreadth away from breaking out of the poem’s controlled couplets and numbered sections. I found it stunning.”
– Richie Hofmann, 2014 Prize Judge
Ian Burnette recently graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where he studied creative writing. He is the recipient of the Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year award, The Kenyon Review’s Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, Kent State University’s National Teen Poetry Contest, and Walnut Hill School for the Arts’ Elizabeth Bishop Prize in Verse. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Blue Pencil Online, and the Foyle Young Poets of the Year anthology. He is an incoming undergraduate at Kenyon College.