The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln Returns to Address the Topic of True Repentance but Fails to Acknowledge the Chains Still at My Feet
Ars Poetica or American Pastoral as Opening Scene for a Micro-documentary After Flipping the Script and Keeping the Darkness for Ourselves
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& there were days I’d request a new cereal box just so I could break its seal, to retrieve with the gift of my hands that which was buried deep inside. So yes, there is a point when a molly becomes an anecdote. When lint in the pockets becomes the center of one’s earth. & what I mean is my grandmother arrived back to Mississippi like her leaving was a mistake. She stepped off the train like a million-dollar god with a two-cent paradise. & the toll that must have taken on her bones’ pride. It takes less swagger to plant a harvest than it does bones to retrieve its crop. The one thing they can never call us is lazy. My aunt spends her retirement in the sun tending her petunias. My grandmother returned to a field of cotton with light pockets before she entered the earth. I prefer creative over resourceful. The homies that live by code of streetlight log more lunar cycles than the ones who patrol. Lazy is a whip. By which I mean, one who oversees a field gallops through the moisture that seeps from its glands, while the fieldhands are already ripe with enough perspiration to produce a second harvest. You see, the thing about my aunt’s petunias is they demand all her attention. Deadheading is the act of keeping what is fleeting beautiful. &, after all that tending, the heads we pluck off go where we go to die. & since a little exercise is par for the course, & the course being that of life, my aunt feels safer coursing throughout her garden that she sprung forth from her hands than she does walking through her neighborhood in the suburbs. & the homie peddling ecstasy as a party drug shipped to him inside a cereal box by way of certified mail, is indebted to the rumble in his stomach. &, I’m not sayin’ it’s right. But I am sayin’ something is wrong when a city demands we live this way. & I know cotton is not harvested until July, & October, in the northern regions of the Southern belt. & now that my relations are no longer under the full weight of the sun, all that clockwork beneath the threat of stroke has shifted. Now, machines plow these fields into the cool of night. & see how they called us lazy among the pastures that first blossomed with flowers, then budded into afros, bulb thick. Now flip that. If lazy is Lillie Mae among the cotton she trimmed slim in Jackson, then this poem is not about a season of returns.
Surely, I Am Able to Write Poems Celebrating Grass and How the Blue in the Sky Can Flow Green or Red—Poems About Nature and Landscape but Whenever I Begin the Trees Wave Their Knotted Branches
&, in a town with no lynch laws, I study how the tulips tuck themselves in at night, but the bars remain open. &, isn’t it funny how the same gown worn by your grandmother during your mother’s birth, could resemble the same gown you wear before your funeral? My grandmother had eleven children. Married a man who’d go to the corner store for butter & come back on a different date. So I ask you, would you rather have a man’s presence every calendar month of a warless year, or one that does not come back broke? My grandfather had stories, & a pocket full of portraits where he’d stroke the faces of dead men. & the story goes—my grandfather died near his fifties. & anything black that survives half a century in this country is worthy of celebration (so I am praying for more time). A weaver is a bird who builds a nest that could outlive a storm. & though I thirst for more than what seems possible most days, I still drink of the river’s water. & did I tell you the how of the weavers’ nest? For love, they build for two days straight. Airlift long blades of grass & tie them to the base of a tree branch until the nest hangs there like a keloid. & for the love of a female, in the wooing year, a man will plunge his hands into a blaze of fire & erect grandeurs of smoke. My great grandmother did not approve of my grandfather at first, but after she witnessed the ash on his hands, what he was willing to unearth was less deniable. When the weaver’s work is finished, he stands over what he has done & beats his wings. If a female arrives, she will inspect the nest. If it is found worthy, she will feed their offspring within it. If it is found wanting, something will be destroyed.
Turnkey Sonnet1 #14: Trope of the Perfect Entertainer Greeting His Flowers or My Attempt to Record Black Geographies into Song
feel how we’ll styl ize any bona fide city-
croon to bloom in lieu of foxgloves.
- The “turnkey” sonnet utilizes the Shakespearean rhyme order (ab ab cd cd ef ef gg), but the “turnkey” turns the vertical rhyme structure horizontal so that the sentence, which follows the aforementioned rhyme order, may be read autonomously as a couplet—similar to a ghazal.
If I’m Talkin’ Nature
I’m talkin’ a harvest. I’m talkin’ a yield. I’m talkin’ how a harvest could mean to gather. & a yield could mean to
pause—as in a moment to digest, & reflect, as in the moment before the squirrels sense something insatiable looming
above their heads. Or when a cardinal alights onto a branch without the promise of holding itself still for my
camera lens. I say cardinal, as if I am talkin’ singular, when mostly I have peeped them traveling in pairs. So what
I really mean to say is a couple. & if I’m talkin’ nature, I’m talkin’ my lone sista joggin’ through the cemetery on
a day when no one is being buried. & everything is in bloom. & how every family has a member named after
a city where the sun rises or the sun sets. Consider yielding there for a moment. & if God is art, then what is it
that we make? & some days there are two MINI Coopers parked outside my home. Which could mean, if you
are a bird lover, & halfway listening, you may have heard me going on about too many Cooper’s perched outside my
home. Which could have meant two or more birds of prey stalking that which is below the nodding branches.
& yes, the nodding branches could resemble that of the church nods. Like that of the child in her pew, palm
fronds in hand, bowing as an act of prayer. Because the weight of the hawks was an act of prayer at one point,
at the tail end of a winter season, when their hunger became a persistent knock. & the squirrels, living inside
the belly ring of a cottonwood, may have thought Jehovah, witness. & He did. & He must have told them to bar
the door. Smear blood on the doorposts. That they were safer inside than they were out. & sure, I could have
made this poem about the pandemic. & quarantine. Or the angel of the Lord. But it’s been like two years. &
the squirrels did not venture near their doorway for at least a month. & you are past that now. & the hawks
have moved on. & though it is true, my wife & I thought the hawks left well fed, & the squirrels did not
survive—they did. & there is something beautiful in that mistake. & sure, this could have been a scene that had
much to do about nothin’. Because I’m guilty of halfway listening, too. & why on God’s green earth would I
not carry flowers into a wedding that were meant for a funeral?
Chaun Ballard is a member of the poetry faculty in the Alaska Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program, a doctoral student of poetry, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner, an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org, and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His chapbook, Flight, was the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The New York Times, The Slowdown, and other literary magazines.
Read Chaun Ballard’s Letter to America poem “Day 40”, winner of the inaugural Terrain.org Editor’s Prize.
