Yearn and Plunder

by Beverly Burch

Smolder, Colleen Morton Busch, Ex Ophidia Press, Omaha, Nebraska, 2026, 88 pages, $18.00, www.exophidiapress.org.

THE TREACHEROUS COUNTRY of uncertainty is Colleen Morton Busch's territory in Smolder, her first poetry collection. Selected by Felicia Zamora for the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest (Ex Ophidia Press), these lucid poems move under the shadow of death after her husband receives a diagnosis of "smoldering multiple myeloma"—yes, a real disorder that threatens to become full-blown multiple myeloma in time.

A diagnosis like that leaves them with daunting unpredictability. The treatment—watching and waiting for a few years or many years—demands going on with life until embers ignite and cancer upends whatever equilibrium they establish. Conflicting feelings and memories merge into each other in lines that nevertheless hold emotional clarity.

My own relationship to uncertainty was summoned, the miserable state of not knowing, waiting, hoping, wanting to know, not wanting to know, fear and then gratitude when I could find a way to live with it. I wanted her answers. What I found was a tenuous path through the unknown, opposite truths in each hand, life and death together, i.e., learning to live while dying, our ever-present human task. And a few of the usual tricks. Magical thinking descends in "Dressing for Death":

You're not sick yet. You smolder,

your illness a not-yet-flared flame.

And it's death's head I want to turn.

If I look good enough, maybe she'll concede

I claimed you first.

She wishes for cosmic direction ("The Department of Explanations"):

What does the universe want?

I've stumped this office before.

There's a dram of pride in that

but no verdict, no end

to the yearn and plunder.

Conjures other trapped creatures ("Wait"):

I'd like to meet the world's loneliest sheep,

stranded for years on a Scottish cliff

…

What better mentor than earth's gaping edge,

than no-choice-but-to-wait?

Rehearses, as loss hangs over her private moments ("When You're Gone"):

Each time you leave, it's like I'm practicing—the slope of waking alone

to eat from your bowl as dawn arrives, arms full of impossible day.

The poems shift between narrative, visual and kinesthetic language with images to evoke sight and scent ("The Last Bloom of Innocence"):

I remember you, two friends abroad,

Serb and Croat, Medoc and bread between your knees,

the one with cropped hair

who spoke of home

in a voice like milk going down,

firming bone.

You leaned into one another

as flowers fold

out of a glass vase.

This is not the first time Busch writes from the brink of disaster. Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire tells the gripping story of five monks at the Tassajara Monastery near Big Sur who chose not to evacuate but instead to fight the fire roaring through the canyon toward them in the Ventana wilderness. With only one road out, if they failed to save the monastery, they would perish with it. Busch herself is a lay-ordained Zen practitioner at the Berkeley Zen Center. She understands practice and commitment.

Fire returns in Smolder as the insignia of life under conditions of uncertainty:

Still Life with Smolder

To the pine or firefighter,

smolder means:

Fire is patient.

Where there's ember,

there will be flame.

In your hematologist's mouth,

the word glows.

We warm our hands

by its constancy,

beseech the long

white of your bones

never to burn.

The poems traverse other losses and catastrophes—a miscarriage, a neighborhood murder, a father's death. Their desire for a child becomes complicated: there's fertility treatment, then failure, then an injunction against pregnancy. The new diagnosis changes everything. Her chosen pronoun in many poems is "we" because what happens to him happens to her. How rarely we acknowledge the sweep of illness, the way one person's misfortune is a sentence upon many.

The smolder progresses to tumor and treatment. After two decades they are back in the "offices" of risk, a place with multiple disturbing options, or "departments" where she is "cancer's faithful secretary."

The Department of Poison as Medicine

When the first lesion appears in the bowl of your hip,

the cure is thirty little pills in a green bottle.

A derivative of the morning sickness cure that pinched newborn limbs into flippers.

Each month, a representative

from the pharmaceutical company calls,

extracts a vow that you won't knock me up the sporting way.

In a Denver suburb, microscopic bits of us can't get enough of each other,

divide and divide in a dish.

But sometimes I want to take a match to whatever it is that can't catch fire.

Break your promise.

Make our very own little fish.

Busch lives in the Bay Area as I do; I know the trails she hikes, with their "scent of eucalyptus, bay, wild plum pit-studded coyote scat" ("To Curran Trail, September 2023"). Against this is the litany of "Lenalidomide, bortezomib, isatuximab, / sometimes cyclophosphamide, always dexamethasone." The shift from lyricism to obtuse medical names underscores the necessity of the poems and the poet to hold opposites close, the play of light and shadow, poetic voice married to scientific language, in lines that dip from the sublime to the stultifying.

Throughout the collection we know what she knows. The cancer flares, it is held back. He exceeds doctors' predictions until time runs out. Without pain or symptoms, cancer still grows. Certain conditions change, other conditions remain the same. In one of the few overt references to her Buddhist practice, Busch finds congruity there ("Lucency at C5").

Myeloma distinguishes itself from other cancers

by fluidity, in emptiness—

one of the Buddha's three marks of existence

into which all realization folds.

It's everywhere and nowhere at once.

Other lines reference it indirectly: "That was before I learned love always includes what isn't loved" ("Fine Art").

This is a book of mourning and grief. But the mourning moves subtly through the voice and never drowns her words' power to speak of staying alive, keep other lights going—hope, joy, warmth—and preserve life as far as love makes possible.

Beverly Burch's poetry has won the John Ciardi Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Gival Poetry Prize. A novel, What You Don't Know, is the first in a trilogy of linked characters. Her second book, The Secret Life of Secrets, is forthcoming in 2027. Her Substack, Rethinking…(Almost) Everything, can be found at www.burchb.substack.com. She lives in Oakland, California. Find out more at www.beverlyburch.com.

— posted September 2026