What Comes

with a line from Makalani Bandele

A poet confirms / that birds don’t pay a bit of attention / to national borders. / One
source says we stand / at 25.9 million refugees, / but days have passed since
publication. / Every season, the river erodes the shore. / Snow is falling on the
mountains, and here / it is flooding. I stand at the doorway to watch / rain cover the
courtyard. / On the television, countries discuss / the building of walls / while
presidents meet and take photos, / remove nations from agreements established /
for climates like this one. / You and I speak / another language, forget the syntax
used / to write proper depositions. / Thousands of footfalls across the continents /
echo in our ears like the blood of a conch shell / found in a quiet place. / Eighteen-
year-old women don scarves, carry Kalashnikovs, / and march into the sun, singing
the meaning of names, and die, singing / the meaning of names. / It has been too
long since / our fingernails also were brown with earth.

Tara Ballard now lives in her home state of Alaska. For eight years, she and her husband lived in the Middle East and West Africa, where they taught English in local area schools and universities. Her collection House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press) won the 2016 Many Voices Project competition, and her poems have been published in North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Spillway, Tupelo Quarterly, and other literary magazines. Her work recently won a 2019 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize.