A shower of snow, ice dust drifting.
Hands so cold they burn, and hot pink memories
of bougainvillea, musk rose burst
into my mind. You, sitting in a grass field, head turned
away from me, the first clue.

Wind picks up, and I tug your old sled
up the track-scabbed hill, lift our son’s small body
onto the graying wood. Watch him laugh and tip
into a pool of space before he, too, speeds away.

—

KB Ballentine’s work has appeared in numerous journals and publications. A finalist for the 2014 Ron Rash Poetry Award, she was also a 2006 finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007.  Fragments of Light(2009) and Gathering Stones (2008) were published by Celtic Cat Publishing. Her third collection, What Comes of Waiting, won the 2013 Blue Light Press Book Award.