Midway

By Chaun Ballard

So now when the ghost asks me

my age, I say, I’m stomach over

the waistband; I’m button up

and neck-tied; I’m shoes no longer

the last squawking on hard wooden

floors; I’m totem pole carved with faces

of the past; I’m apple for lunch, walnuts,

and pleasant dinners; I’m red cross

bloodletting and good credit; I’m

my father in that faded polaroid

taken somewhere in California;

I’m high school reunion almost

checked the box: maybe; I’m electric

slide and Jesus music, hallelujahs

and morning glory; I’m open

book and lamp light; I’m Achilles

if he lived during the Renaissance;

I’m nearly in danger of not being

a danger; old enough to say,

you were good and died young.

Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former poet laureate of the United States. She edited “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” and her “Collected Poems: 1974-2004” was published in 2016. Chaun Ballard is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, a Callaloo fellow and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His chapbook, “Flight,” was the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and was published by Tupelo Press.

Illustration by R.O. Blechman