ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
★ ★ ★ ★
DEVON BALWIT
Image by Dirk Bakker, 2017
Borne Along: Parabolic Poem (2x^ 2 + 4)
The chevrons form and undo themselves, late arrivals winging over, the leader tiring,
alerting us below to a deeper pull than want,
the planet hungering
as it spins, tilts,
carrying us along
following the high honking, the shifting patterns,
sometimes in front, sometimes behind, never quite sure where we are going, trusting the yearning.
(Ofi 12/2016)
Photo by Suzanne Simmons
Eco Echo: An Oldster’s Tale
old man remembers
before we were here
old man says green breathed
bulged into food
old man says green lived
that got under nails
old man says green was noisy
mouth blowing tiny
old man jumps off furniture
trying to be light
old man says green
cold made it brown
old man says it spoke
he rubs his palms
old man says green held him
hid in its belly
old man says green held him
hid in its belly
what it was like there
he says listen before he forgets
took sun and made air
reached unfurled hung down
in dirt stuff
hid things that crawled
happy or warning
he shows me
like green’s singers
but he can’t lift up
changed color
heat yellow
went hush hush in fast air
and makes them whisper
that he climbed on its shoulders
gathered its scraps
that he climbed on its shoulders
gathered its scraps
410 ppm
We exhale, wring out
the last exudate, frack
whatever can be split
and leave, slagpits gaping,
billions of mouths
release a vortex of bags
and O-rings, toothbrushes
and bottles clotting
the ocean in a vivid
phlegm, coral bleaching,
glaciers gassed to scree.
The walk to the well
stretches longer,
children setting out
before dawn, no
telling whether
they will grow up
before the blue planet
browns into a spinning
ruin, mute testimony
to a species hell-bent
on convenience.
(Poets Reading the News, Earth Day 2017)
Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/ Complicated (with the Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found in Cordite, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, The Ekphrastic Review, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, Posit, and more.
Suzanne Simmons’s poems, essays and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in Miramar, Rattle, The New York Times, The Baltimore Review, Fifth Wednesday and numerous other journals. She volunteers for hospice and Monarch Watch and lives on the rocky Maine coast.
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