Dialogue:

Luke Johnson and Leslie Lindsay

Luke Johnson on Leslie Lindsay’s “Crevasse”

I’m reminded of Neruda’s The Book of Questions while reading Lindsay’s “CREVASSE.” The way in which each question commands both an answer and yet opens like “a wound eviscerated”, a door that leads to many doors, to newfound mezzanines and entrapments. This poem commands an active reader. One willing to call and respond, to even wrestle with, and might I go as far as to say, deny? I feel like I’m in a spooky house with a narrator whispering directions. I don’t have to go left, but I’m encouraged to, even rewarded when I submit. Such audacity! Such sexy command! To be given a choice but courted like a lover. By the end of the first question I’m sold. Why? Because anyone dimly self aware, knows they have emotional triggers, trap doors, minefields and wounds. The metaphor of a house is close enough to the structure of the self, to both root the poem in narrative reality (a house swallowed by a storm or flood) and lyric association (the body/mind/psyche as a house). That metaphoric accuracy makes the speaker believable and relatable, adding to their persuasion. That persuasion leads us to “the gaping gaze” of a woman in a mirror, and though we never know who that woman is, it doesn’t matter. Because we’re now 1: standing behind her as witness and 2: see ourselves in the mirror. And what do you see? That’s what is being asked.

Leslie Lindsay on Luke Johnson’s “Sweetheart”

At first read, I was captivated by Luke Johnson’s use of a slightly epistolary form, as the speaker is addressing a sweetheart in a letter following the days and nights following the death of one’s father. And then I fell in love with the aesthetics, the sonic quality of the words ‘soot’ and ‘grit,’ ‘smear,’ ‘static,’ and ‘crackle;’ the ‘whisper of wind,’ ‘smoldering,’ ‘charred,’ and ‘carved’ I discovered a deeper, more resonate turning in from death to birth with qualities of ‘rhythm,’ ‘water,’ ‘womb,’ how at once we begin life as a ‘shadow,’ or ‘dream,’ and leave in much the same manner, a tipping of the dome, returning, perhaps as a bird in a redwood. Luke Johnson provides a porous assemblage of grief, an undulation of emotion in both spatial and temporal terms, with an underlying hum of humanity intermingling with nature.

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.