New Poetry by KB Ballentine

Fear  

It’s a lichen crawling  

over the barks of ruined oaks and pine, 

scattering across rocks like spilled 

crickets – a barren desert-scape  

where sand swallows the sky, 

slopes shape-shifting the horizon; 

it’s the scalped remains  

of an autumn yard, wind betraying   

the last warmth before winter, 

a woodpecker drumming hollow logs. 

It is sludge spilling over garbage bins, 

an alley hazed with smog, shards of vinegar  

and beer bottles gleaming greenly, 

rusted rails of the subway fence  

whining in a lonely street.  

Whether the drab walls of waiting rooms 

or the scuffed turf of an empty field, 

the dented Maverick in an adjacent lot  

or scarred scales of a trout lured  

from an algae-filmed lake: 

it waits.

- © KB Ballentine 2021

KB Ballentine’s seventh collection, Edge of the Echo, was released May 2021 with Iris Press. Her earlier books can be found with Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including Pandemic Evolution (2021), In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.