Tara Ballard

On the Notion of Lentils

Za’atar dusts the yellow soup / like poppies across a field. // I stare down at my bowl, surprised / by the salt in my reaction: / It is as if / I’m looking at a stretch of photos, watching / a video I did not realize was recorded, / as if I’m seeing olive oil: pressed by dear ones, / picked from trees: My husband again on the ladder, / me on the blue tarp, dividing good from not so. / As if I am again washing soil from my fingers, / edging earth from under my nails after a full day, / remembering the table, elbows that rest / on its edges, stories spoken and heard / and told to bring with us. // I lift my spoon / from the napkin and take a sip. // Again / remove the stones. Again chop the onion. Mouth / the words for water, cumin. / It is November / and cold. Again we sleep in scarves and warm / hands on the space heater that too heats chestnuts. / It is winter, and, again, the news is bad. / We watch a tank on the street corner. // No, it is March. It is spring. I am in Portland, / and there are no poppies. It is spring, / and, please, don’t bring the coffee. // I already know what the fortune reads.

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Tara Ballard spent eight years in the Middle East and West Africa, but has now returned home to Alaska. Her collection House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press) won the 2016 Many Voices Project prize in poetry. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, 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.