Say blue
and the clouds part on a summer day
Say green
and tall grasses wave in a gentle breeze
Say granite
and the local archive becomes a convent again
They say place is a territory between
invention and creation and maybe it is
beautiful like Eden with fruit trees flowering
and a brook’s gentle laughter
or maybe it is brutal—
abandoned and windows boarded,
adobe walls cracked and caving in—
a place of famine and loneliness
Say swift
and it will find a nest
in the chimney or pipes
Don’t say hope:
winter is a lonely Spiderman
backpack tied to a dying tree
Ray Ball
Ray Ball currently lives on the land of the Dena’ina, where she works as a history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of four books, including the chapbooks Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature, 2019) and Lararium (Variant Lit, 2020). Her poems and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including descant, Glass, Orange Blossom Review, and X-R-A-Y and have received multiple nominations for Pushcart and has been a Best of the Net finalist. She is an associate editor at Coffin Bell and an assistant editor at Juke Joint. You can find her on Twitter @ProfessorBall.
