Dialogue:

Leslie Grollman and Jake Romm

Leslie Grollman in response to Jake Romm’s “Highway Blues” and “Maine Dream #1”

of asphalt eye

                                 a found poem in Highway Blues, by Jake Romm 

I am tar breaking

                                  Bare

         Dead of give

     All give

                   To be (not)

Interrupted

Last and never

                    Sorry

                                     Wet

because, eventually, every thing

                       In response to Maine Dream #1, by Jake Romm

Because you ask me to stake trees and men and ghosts, to hear fog
sway, to feel ocean whispers. Because you ask me to
discourse ‘like’ and ‘between’. I cannot help but conjure golems
and thunder, dandelions, the sky scowling. I cannot help but hear
grasses curse men’s clumsy feet. My hand is so hot I cannot feel
anything else. I shore-up a lakeside oasis in my desert knowing no
one will come. I encircle it with basketball-player-sized palm trees.
A lemonade stand charges 25 cents a cup, a brother and sister try
not to drink the profits, but the incessant sun auto-repeats its silent
warning. I run toward them. My feet leave no marks. My breath
sprints far ahead of me, vaporizing after dropping a quarter onto the
table. The brother and sister push a glassful forward. The insistent
sun’s hands lift the cup, pour the pale yellow liquid onto its face.
Steam rises, scumbling the sky as if to spell out surrender to those
still here.

Jake Romm in response to Leslie Grollman’s “THE RED” and “Thus the Arroyo after the Storm”

by the grace of God

braids of snakeskin 

all unravelling: our homes, our bodies

depart never to return

erased

ash tell us, tell us again

how waves of butchered bodies surrounded us,

comfort us with an ordinary stench 

when we dance, we lose ourselves in God:

whipped

hazed

gouged.

Thus: the

in                                 a bardo

in                                 a marsh

in                                 a gap-stop 

in                                 a matter of fact

in                                 a sad god

in                                 a sneeze

in                                 a splattering

in                                 a slime

in                                 a gloat

in                                 a rapid

in                                 a cup

in                                 decay

in                                 entropy

in                                 the dead

a                                  scar

a                                  tear

a                                  bartering

 the sound of doors locking

For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.

If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.