Journal of Writing & Environment

Man Whole

Poetry by Mary Ballard

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Mary Ellen Ballard grew up in Plymouth, Minnesota. She now lives in Fort Collins, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University. Recent and forthcoming work can be found on The Volta and in Hayden’s Ferry Review.

I wrote this poem while I was living in Tucson and working as a live-in caregiver. My home was at the base of the Catalina Mountains and I would go hiking each morning with the man I was taking care of. These walks were long and quiet, giving me much time to think and study my surroundings, and after living in Minneapolis and Chicago, this strikingly new landscape fascinated me. I found myself constantly in awe and engaged with the environment, and I noticed that this contact with the desert did something to my mind and imagination. While writing this poem, I was thinking about the relationship between one’s body and the landscape as well as how different environments foster or hinder the intimacy of that relationship.

the city was immovable

behind tulip walls

to be stirred, a bear

to be birthed again

a new order

of things illuminated

beneath streetlamps

asphalt cloaked

in thinning skin of ice

the city was immovable

knit together in metal

womb the morning radio

wafts about the pipes

slinking through the sewer

the people make their way

to the drycleaners

diluting traces of salt-

water from their skin