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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 34: Sept. 2026
Cheribun: 68 words
By Susan Burch

Voice Boxed In

 

I was always afraid to talk on zooms, so people read my poems for me. They knew I responded in the chat, so they talked to me that way, keeping me connected, but also enabling me. If only I had known then, what I know now...

all those years 
I had a voice 
and didn’t use it 

an ocean of words 
silenced 

with Esophageal Cancer 

 

—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Susan Burch
Issue 34 (September 2026)

is a good egg.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

Eight Haiku by Susan Burch in Pulse: voices from the heart of medicine (between August 2024 and June 2015)

Too Late, tanka prose by Burch in contemporary haibun online 20.1 (April 2024)

Winning by Default, tiny haibun by Burch in The Other Bunny (22 January 2024)

Wi(n)dow, haibun by Burch in contemporary haibun online 19.3 (December 2023)

TANKA TAKE HOME: Susan Burch, poet of the month in Trivenai Haikai India (25 October 2023)

New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners—Susan Burch, interviewed by Julie Bloss Kelsey for The Haiku Foundation Blog, Troutswirl (3 October 2021)

Three Tanka by Burch reprinted at The Tanka Society of America (2017)

Meet Susan Burch: Downtown DC’s Most Famous Haiku Poet by Emily Codik at The IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award (13 March 2015)

 
 
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