Devon Balwit
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Today’s miCRo is a lively poem with surprising turns of diction and syntax, as nouns mutate into verbs and adjectives. As the title indicates, the poem is aware of itself as poem but isn’t limited by that conceit; it’s not a proverbial noisy gong but an energetic dance. Holy mackerel, I love the wordplay in this one—it’ll leave you, like the speaker, “openmouthed.”
To hear Devon read her poem, click below:
In This Poem, I Noun
I raven. I split bud-scale. Never before so ember on the tongue, so odalisque. Branches ruffle aftermath. I bell, the gong of me pitted from smack. What an effort to anvil beneath the forging blows. I crepe between seasons. It isn’t you, they cowcatcher, shoveling me down steep grade. Flat on my back, I sky— silver and cirrus. Holy mackerel. Holy gloaming. As if I weren’t openmouthed enough.
Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, Oregon. She has six chapbooks and three collections out or forthcoming, among them: We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books, 2017), Risk Being/Complicated (a collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic, 2018); Where You Were Going Never Was and In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books, 2018 and 2017); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books, 2017). Her individual poems can be found or are upcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, the Aeolian Harp folio anthology, SWWIM, Eclectica, Posit, Rattle, and more.
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