Best New Poets 2006: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

Edited by Eric Pankey Jeb Livingood, Series Editor

141 pages, 8 1/4 x 7

Paper 978-0-9766296-1-0 • $11.95

I Am Thinking of My First Deer

A doe, her legs spread open
in the back of my father’s truck,
her body a brown map near blue sky.
My father turns her over, she is the color of earth.
She’s warm and my fingers smell of sage
and blood. I piece her together in my mind
as my brothers remove her skin.
I give her back her body, the same way
I was promised Jesus would return to us on earth.
I am thinking of my first deer
because you are sleeping
and underneath your lids, your eyes are open.
My fingers smell slightly of things broken
and I realize you are always afraid
of the way I open myself,
how I must swallow up every sadness.
I wonder if somehow I’ve always known you.
If you have returned in another form
leaving behind the fur of your death.

—Teresa Ballard

 

Response to an Academic Question

The West: a place or a process?

Once I was a schoolgirl and the center of my compass was shoreline and fog. I was not concerned with my place in the world. The hands of my wristwatch told time and
nothing more. If you had asked me the difference between suburb and city I’d have shown you the ocean. My parents were travel agents. I grew up and flew coach. I had
something to say but my mouth was stuffed with fortune cookies. They were manufactured in Houston. One of them read: Enjoy nature, visit a park. Another one read: A good way to live longer is to eat more Chinese food. For a time I plowed rice fields in Hokkaido. That’s a lie, I never made it to Hokkaido, but I came close. Li Po fell off his boat, Pound played telephone, and voila, modern poetry. Soon the easterners were dressing like the westerners who were showing up at cocktail parties decked in qi paos. And the green grass grew all around all around, the green grass grew all around.

—Barbara Yien

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Theresa Ballard, whose poems have appeared in Pleiades and Massachusetts Review, has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Baraba Yien's poetry has appeared in 42opus and Margie.