KB Ballentine
KB Ballentine’s sixth collection, The Light Tears Loose, appeared this summer with Blue Light Press. Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at: http://www.kbballentine.com.
Threading Time
More than broken stars,
our vapor sketches the sky –
bits of crystal, of ice burning the night.
Filmed in negative, a trail of ravens gliding by.
Pine distilled to turpentine slips through furrowed bark,
hawthorn flowering, fruiting then rotting in heat and frost.
Wind chronicles our change,
our trek beyond the ash grove to stone circles
that silhouette ever-greening fields leaning
into the sea. Waves salt the rock, the sand
with a breath of what’s left of us.
A grain. Just one – hungering for more.
Aurora at Rest
Nightmares can’t scorch her sleep –
only dissolve as stars spin,
ring the universe. Slivers of dreams
coalesce, gathering strength and light
though silence and shadow surround her.
Color swells and explodes,
and even the darkness cannot consume her.
She doesn’t see it yet, but veins of promise
pulse, sequin the galaxy. Sunbursts surge and spiral.
Like a phoenix, she wakes, blazes with life.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 