TARA BALLARD

Kun Fayakoun

If I turn my face away
from the ceramic pot,
coriander sprouts grow taller
despite the lack of rainfall  
in my living room.
A woman who calls me
“sister” asks me to place
sheep brain on my tongue.
I am sure there is reason
to digest the command center
of an animal once used to describe
our relationship with God,
but noiselessness is stopped
by the many pebbles of car horns
from the street outside. Below
us: a wedding, a stoplight.
After this, we will drink
lemon juice with mint
from wine glasses greener
than four hundred oasis palms.
When I sleep, I wander kilometers
in search of a curried stew made
with cauliflower and potatoes.
I have heard there is a tea
that can save me from the endless
swaying I feel after I swallow
mouthfuls of turquoise sea.
And, somehow, the scarab survives
a construction zone. Just yesterday,
I saw him trundle past toppled mounds
of concrete and rebar, exoskeleton
shining in the sun like a puddle
of oil under a Fiat. Each evening,
I walk by a murmuration
of trees, and the temperature drops
to a tolerable heat. It only takes two or three
to create a cool like kisses across my arms, 
but, sometimes, I forget to breathe.
Sometimes, I pull a small mouse
from my lips, string-like tail sending a shiver
through my shoulders and down my spine.
Once I know what this means,
I will tell you.

Tara Ballard, after eight years in the Middle East and West Africa, is now home in Alaska. Her collection, House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), is the winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, and her poems have been published by North American Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southampton Review, Spillway, and other literary magazines. She recently won a 2019 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize.