Poetry By Tara Ballard

Sean Benham CC




Numbers  


What precedes the apple if not 
an equation? The ivy-covered house 
down the road from here is not mine, 
nor my father’s, and my grandmother 
has never known it. I was grown 
from their silences as well as their laughter: 
a tumble to cover, even when real 
as peppers cut and held to the tip 
of a tongue. I know that it hurts. 
There is a teaching that punishment 
follows three, maybe four, generations, 
and I struggle to count when looking 
backwards—to the father of my father 
and his grandfather whose face in the photo 
sprouts a memory they fear soon I will 
be able to touch. The mirror is hard, 
and my father refuses to use his words. 
He steps outside and smokes a cigarette. 
No snow is falling. What I mean to say is, 
depending on the time of day, there is shade 
beneath the branches. When the sun warms 
the leaves, the apples nearly hum 
in their sweetness. The ivy-covered house 
is not ours, and I do not want it. 
My grandmother’s grandfathers and their fathers 
were on the manifest as refugees. They landed 
in Virginia. As a child, she picked walnuts 
in the afternoon and spoke no French 
and took no school and that was our country. 
Her mother cleaned houses that were covered 
in ivy. Her father, in the cemetery. 
He dug graves. How many and for how long
I cannot say. My grandmother has passed. 
In what soil am I to find the answer 
to my questions? I am not sure what it is 
these hollows mean. 

​


An assistant professor of English, Tara Ballard holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New York Quarterly, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and a recent fellow at The New School's Institute for Critical Social Inquiry.


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