After the Last Visitor Leaves
Heat strafes the air, shock waves
of palpable pressure settling against my skin.
Shadows crease corners of the yard,
thin lines offering no respite
to black-eyed susans, blue hydrangea.
Behind the daily news,
your taciturn mask, our grief
still froths
behind my quiet question,
What will we do with all this food?
When you don’t answer, I take the plates
to the kitchen—see her pink sweater
hanging in the hall. Watch the clock
tick another second.
Harvesting Shadows
How do I say you were the love of my life
without sounding cheesy, clichéd?
Picking cherries in Auvillar I think of you—
strawberries and late spring picnic with snow.
We huddled in the park,
devoured each other
under the flurries. Fire that sparks
in graying twilight.
Deep green brushes heavy on my face.
All these leaves make it so damn difficult.
Like you.
Hard to get,
harder to keep,
and I didn’t succeed.
The night I waited in the bar
for you—the first time
I said I love you—
you looked out the window,
turned your back. Twenty years later your smile
still charms, you don’t see me.
You watched for failure,
for betrayal—and that’s what you got,
even from this loyal lapdog.
The fruit under this azure sky is sweet
and bright. The ladder unsteadies my stance.
I drop some of my treasure, watch it bruise.
Je m’en fous. Je m’en fous.
Bio: KB Ballentine has a M.A. in Writing and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. In 2014 she was a finalist in the Ron Rash Poetry Awards and, in 2006, a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007. Fragments of Light (2009) and Gathering Stones (2008) were published by Celtic Cat Publishing. Her work also appears in River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-first Century (2015), Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (2013) and Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets (2011). Her third collection, What Comes of Waiting, won the 2013 Blue Light Press Book Award. Her newest collection was just awarded the 2016 Blue Light Press Book Award and will be out this summer.