Brandon Kilbourne is a two-time Pushcart-nominated poet and research biologist at the Berlin Museum of Natural History. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Poet Lore, Obsidian, Terrain.org, Tahoma Literary Review, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere, with his work also being translated into Estonian in Sirp. He has given invited poetry readings at scientific conferences on entomology, natural history, and paleontology in Canada, the UK, and the US, and in 2024, he was Artist-in-Residence in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University, during which he explored the parallels between science and poetry.

BACK OF THE ENVELOPE

"Lettow-Vorbeck and His Uncatchable Lizard" and "The Location We Look For"

By BRANDON KILBOURNE

But after seeing the bone-lean bodies trailed behind
your soldiers’ growling stomachs, the unearthing
of your uncatchable lizard would have offered you
a sight recognizable though rewritten in rock