TARA BALLARD

Harvest

Because it is hotter than it should be in Alaska,
I am cross-legged on the back deck in my swimming suit.
 
A stack of rhubarb beside me. Their long, red ribs.
Poisonous leaves, like umbrellas, already deposited
 
near the alder bushes for a quicker return to dirt.
I strip like garlands each stalk. They curl, ribboned
 
like holiday gifts. Their slender stretch releasing juice
that coats my palms. That tart scent. A dragonfly,
 
also slender, hovers near the nasturtiums’ orange faces.
Rhubarb was brought here by Russian immigrants,
 
and I wonder if my grandmother remembers her mother,
my great-grandmother and keeper of a Russian passport,
 
sitting outside in the cool of the day, in the shade
of more comfortable weather. What astonishes me
 
is the tenacity of bumblebees. Beside the rhubarb,
rooted in soil, grow peonies. Full-skirted and pink
 
as flamingo feathers. The bees, understanding, of course,
the perfume love found in a peony’s center, work despite
 
thick gusts of wind, gusts that fluster even the conifers.
As I bent and broke the rhubarb stalks, I watched two, three
 
furry bumbles hold onto bending petals. I strip like ribbons
long curls, claret. I cut each stalk in half. Traditionally,
 
rhubarb was used for medicinal purposes. Only
when sugar became accessible was the plant useful,
 
delightful, for consumption, for breakfast or evening treat.
I hum like the bees. Maybe a month ago, a man was swallowed
 
by a humpback whale and survived. How else would I know this?
He survived, spat into salt water. Tenacious. I must reconsider now,
 
what I assume of Pinocchio, Jonah. The fires from Siberia
have arrived. Just as the fires from the California coast
                                                                                                                     
have spread across the continent below me. Fires of this size
are capable of making their own weather. I am going to make
 
a rhubarb dessert, unnamed, because that is what my mother gave me.
The ingredients, instructions, but no name. There is a message
 
in this, I’m sure. Soon I have a mountain range of curls, ribbons,
red. Rhubarb strings stick to my fingers. I cut limbs into slices
 
and fill a ceramic bowl. I hold it in my hands. I smell like earth.  

Tara Ballard is the author of House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project. Her poems have been published in The Adirondack Review, Crab Creek Review, Diode, Ibbetson Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere, and her work won a 2019 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. An affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, she is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Nebraska.