DEVON BALWIT
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
Patron of Lost Causes
He’s lost all hair below the waist, the creep,
and now skulks in the nakedness of bones,
visible through parchment skin.
To pick him up is to be closer to the workings
of the body than is comfortable, his abdomen
a bag for busy organs.
Some say put him down, not meaning the floor,
but I am overly-identified, pulling clumps
of my own hair from the morning brush.
He eats, he drinks, he sidles. What doesn’t he do
that they would like apart from compel admiration?
None of us will do that long.
The creep has nothing to fear from me.
I will let him be until he suffers and probably
beyond that—just to be sure.
Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook, Forms Most Marvelous, forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems have appeared in numerous print/on-line journals, among them: Oyez, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, Serving House Journal, The Journal of Applied Poetics, Emerge Literary Journal, Timberline Review, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.
