by Devon Balwit
She rolled her eyes, and then she was gone. Liang Xiangyi, who raised her eyebrows and turned away from a fellow journalist who was asking a servile question during China’s choreographed National People’s Congress on Tuesday, has not been seen or heard from since. —The Sunday Times, March 17, 2018
Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young lady!
my grandmother would thunder, underscoring
her message with a smack of a firm palm
against my cheek. Fake-meek, I lowered lids
against hot embers and dumped my dirty dishes
in the sink. I’ve still not learned, giving in
to the eye roll just the other day when confiscating
the exam of a young man who swore
he wasn’t cheating even though his phone screen
glowed with the very words being tested.
Or when Rubio faulted Obama’s relaxing
of discipline for our most recent spate
of school shootings. I wasn’t alone
in registering disbelief at the bad faith,
eyes looping like memes. It’s hard to give
nothing away, disgust ripe in one’s nostrils.
Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.