BY STACEY BALKUN

Exclusion Zone

There was such a thing once

as a cello. As an apple

we could eat, two girls alone

in the orchard long abandoned.

We crouch on our hands

and knees, unearth pale mushrooms

we pitch against rough trunks

leaving a streak of dust delicate

as mythology, as the deer we used

to see bounding. There was such

a thing once as music and we make

it up through our lips, chapped

from whistling through the ragged

weeds soured by the plant

that used to grow here, all tall

walls and atoms split and once

there was such a thing as power

but we were never the ones

who held it, wild in the woods

with our voices and our stories

and our bow-less hands. Now

we tie shoelaces to fallen limbs,

our fingertips burning, thighs

burning, tongues burnt already.

We don’t even know what to chase

or if there’s any prize for winning.

We never did learn how to sing.

The Fall

Darling, we are not your forest

and we are not your ghost, dark

and shadowed as an ocean of peat and ash.

Forget the words beginning and end.

Remember, you won’t find either.

Remember, there’s nothing you can’t forget.

Darling, no longer darling, don’t be foolish

enough to drop stones or breadcrumbs.

Forget the words twig and kindling.

It’s dusk and it will always be dusk.

Don’t look for a woman or her dress-on-fire.

Two sticks will not strike sparks.

We are the forest; we are the flood.

You are ours now so forget

the words breath and wave.

We take no pity on you or anyone lost

to this wasteland, any woman tossed

from a brighter garden.

To us, there’s no difference

between burnt and drowned.

On the First of March Crows Begin to Search

—Oil on canvas. Kay Sage (1947)

our land for what’s been left

behind. An easel. A rocks glass, a shred

of self-worth. Evidence

in an empty bottle, my want

overlooked. I hid a cocoon

in my throat, slippery and not yet

brilliant. All this falling

water, a fallen tree. Wet wood

won’t spark. I had built

a nest, bought a farmhouse,

hammered a studio into the barn:

the start of a bog-less life

without midnights

or regret, just Murphy’s soap

to wash the oil

from our hands. But the water froze

into perfect cubes in the blue tray

and the whiskey hissed its siren song

begging to be poured.

And the peat moss smelled

of ash and the magpies,

black-eyed and angular, devoured

all this only because once, it was mine.

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter (Sundress 2021). Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and other anthologies & journals. Visit her online at http://www.staceybalkun.com.