ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Tara Ballard is from Alaska. For eight years, she lived in the Middle East and West Africa, and she is now pursuing her PhD in the American Midwest. She is author of House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project. Her poems have been published in Diode, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and other literary magazines. Her work received a 2019 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize.
Also by Tara Ballard:
Okay, Rumi, I Am Here
Genealogy, Ending in a Suicide
Self-Portrait with Thorn and Sea
Swimming Late
The waxing moon and stars
scatter like pomegranate seeds
across a glass table. I tread water,
unable to graze bottom,
surface at my chin. Night above
is a warm breeze; tiles lapis lazuli
deep squares below.
And in the Mediterranean
is Du‘a. There is Zainab
and Fatimah: so many: women
and wives and daughters. I catch
echo — each voice falling
into ink — taste salt that coats
their lips and teeth, hers and hers,
and here a chlorine masquerade.
My stomach feels pelican,
like I’ve swallowed the pool
whole,
and I feel inside the need
to break from this body, climb
the ladder, pull the sky close.
I first started writing this poem while I lived in the Arabian Peninsula, where I would often go night swimming in the cooler weather. My colleagues and friends from Syria were sharing a lot with me at the time regarding the war and the continued migration of refugees across the Mediterranean. When I moved back to the United States, I quickly realized how insular our media is and how focused on ourselves, the news. So much of what is happening, or has happened, is not addressed or given space. This unsettles me, and I hope this poem speaks to this unsettling.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published quarterly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
