T.E. Ballard
A Green So Small | Language Of Stones

A Green So Small

I love like this,
scarlet branches touching down to blue,
hyacinths, tulips, indigo.
Spring is too much,
with her small dropper
where is the rationing?
A still voice remembers,
speaks in tongues of drought, dry wind.

Here on the top soil
a line, an opening of clay.
A hungry god who eats
all that we have loved, our very bone.

Green, sweet green, sex
on fingers, dark tips
of where you open like clouds.
I drink in rivers of scarlet, drown
to your blue. Why do I love like this,
why is it impossible
to pick a single bloom?

Language Of Stones

I understand the breadth of fossils,
being defined by loss. Oxidation of one green leaf
to stone. You say it will not be the same with us.

But death is all around,
and the worm does not go hungry.

Does he understand my need for you?
Dressed in his androgynous skin
can he eat his way through rock?

Some bury their dead in pine boxes
so that a hundred years from now,
time leaves her mark and the dead are dead,
and do not sit
like unclaimed plastic treasures
waiting for an open lid.

The weight of water
falls through stone and night crawls
white in the belly of a moon.
Open is my need for you, a language
spoken in thigh
as the world sleeps on.

Poet's Biography:

T.E. Ballard is a professional artist and writer now living in the Midwest with her two young daughters. You may find more of her work in The Melic Review, Palmanock Review, Mandrake Press, Tryst, Gumball Poetry, Pierian Springs, Snow Monkey and as the Special Merit Winner in the 2002 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award sponsored by the Comstock Review.