In California where my brother filled a pot with hot water& poured it out through the thousands of miniature squaresthat make up the whole of a screen window which heldas expected securely to its square frame high abovethe branches of a newly planted tree where I’d watch the birdsthat I could not name alight & ascend leaving the brancheswaving their freshly budded leaves as a gesture to a memorythat has returned only to fly again in the wind that blew pagesfrom a Hustler magazine into the air with stars coveringthe most intimate parts of the regions I would come to associatewith desire but not before my brother & I observed there belowour second-floor apartment window a neighbor’s kid diggingholes into what we thought was our dirt the tree for the momentunbothered newly minted into a world in which we gatheredwords like mine & ours & my brother & I thought we wereprotecting our father’s investment which was really notour father’s investment but an idea we believed meant ownershipwhere monthly dues figured more than the home my parentspurchased for twenty-seven thousand dollars in the 70’s& is still down to the dollar worth the same some fifty years laterwhere later the water my brother poured out from the screenof the second-floor window found its target on topof our neighbor’s head the water now lukewarm no doubtto the touch cooled by the air it encountered on its descent& I of course can prove none of this because the headwhich belonged to our neighbor who was really a small kid thatlooked up at our second-floor window & said This is not your landplanted a sentence that no doubt stayed with me long enoughfor me to share this memory with you & by you I mean the silenceI have come to expect & if this reframing were a trailer for a moviewhere the two of us by some tolerance would eventually embracethe other as lovers I swear to you there would be a deeply ingrainedtune playing at the end.
Second Nature
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“Second Nature” from SECOND NATURE: by Chaun Ballard.
Published by BOA Editions on April 1, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Chaun Ballard.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Tara Ballard
Chaun Ballard’s chapbook, Flight, was the recipient of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and was published by Tupelo Press. His second chapbook, Love Poems to My Future Self, was the recipient of the Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize and was published by Cave Canem. His full-length collection, Second Nature, received the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Prize awarded by BOA Editions, Ltd. and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Northwest, Obsidian, The Rumpus, The New York Times Magazine, and other literary magazines.
Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation.
“Chaun Ballard’s compelling debut collection, Second Nature, weds formal engagement and innovation with explorations of American history as it intersects with African American lives. An interrogation of archives and what’s preserved there engenders voices of figures like Crispus Attucks. These poems rooted in those lives—the poet’s family and community—take on broader implications when nonhuman beings like the weaver bird, the robin, and fireweed are brought into the conversations. These poems draw on the past for our present and future. Ultimately these poems are, as one of Ballard’s poems puts it, 'stories' that should be 'ringing in the ear of each generation.'”
—Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods
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