4 Poems by Theo Ellin Ballew
A HOLE OF A FINGER
her white hair
it’s sharp and snaps
she paces inside banks
for days
her sister has
no pictures left
to take out after
they dip them very deep
in the well
(her sister did not like
to drop them down as
round glass saucers
for milk)
WALK LIKE GOUGING HOLES
“it's only when you and your cousin look like sisters that you can really start having fun”
if I have to choose between her and the sun...
I’m an attic
my head turns over
so I descend
I’m nasally
my fingers are called “moths that won’t stop fluttering”
and it doesn’t matter what year the lake stretched out
below the brisk leaves sitting on the fat trees
we are
well, we are watching
FOUND OUR SPOON, BELOW MANY FANCY NEW ONES
finally we choose
the overflowing world
there we find meaning in
a peculiar pastime (chilled, eroded
under wraps into sterile gratitude by
some long-past tiny touch): pleasure-rooted we
throw one hand up and, with the
other, pin our mouths
down with red sweets and
some knit or plait into muddy
veins that fight to reach our
navels first and we do this till we’re back (seated, waiting)
BUTTON-DOWN, A LONG PERSON
my amazed feeling of love
gives me brutal skills
beneath the low-hanging patches of wet green sky
I roll out my new muffled voice
I chant the names of the foods that cling to
the one standing wall
I will die of a stomach
stamped by its own ice
someone
is driving me insane
it is you
you bite into the body
Theo Ellin Ballew is half Fresno cowboy and half Baltimore Jew. She grew up on 4-to-11-hour drives between cities in the greater Southwest. All her poems are fictional; many are bedtime stories. An Inch Thick came out last year with Ornithopter Press, and Bedtime Stories for the Worshipped is forthcoming with Wonder Press. She also writes code to free and/or fuck with the internet via net.art and sites like Red Calendar. Her work has been featured widely and you can see most of it at theo.land/.