POSEUR

by Devon Balwit

The New York Times

Today, I’m much struck by a phrase in the news

and try it out—“I demand your unconditional surrender!”—

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

Like magic, it aligns differing views.

(Backed by troops and gelignite, no wonder!) 

I’m much struck by this phrase from the news.

 

“Bring me tribute,” I add, “your children, booze!”

and suddenly, my house dazzles with gilt-y splendor.

My finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse,

 

my cup runneth over with oily ooze.

I down glass after glass, a drunk on a bender,

spurred on by this phrase I pulled from the news.

 

Outside, the sky purples to the shade of a bruise.

Let lesser men hide. I now live for thunder,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

As if on a pulpit staring down at the pews,

I fulminate, my creed’s best defender,

completely transformed by this phrase from the news,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

TO GATSBY

by Devon Balwit

USA Today Instagram graphic, November 3, 2025

A hundred years since Fitzgerald gave us The Great Gatsby,

a man we first meet reaching into the dark.

At first, he seems sad, then sinister, then sad again.

Some people have it so easy, old sport,

he marvels in his practiced accent. We know. We can see 

their ballrooms scintillating, distant and unreachable. 

We gather at their property line and try to make sense of their hilarity.

The vast eyes of advertisements—crypto, AI, online gambling—

stand in for God’s: No matter how hard we work 

the lever, the payout goes to the next guy, to someone 

someone’s only heard about. You need cash to sleep 

with another man’s wife. Spoiler: The book ends 

with a bang—a car crash, Gatsby’s murder, a suicide.

Sycophants queued up for his parties. None came to his funeral.

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

HOUSE ARREST

by Devon Balwit

A few months before he began his 2022 Senate campaign, JD Vance reached out to a conservative family policy group with an idea for an opinion essay. He wanted to write about why government-subsidized day care was bad — and why most young children do better when one parent stays home... “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hard-wired to bond with mom,” said Jenet Erickson, a co-writer of Mr. Vance’s 2021 essay and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative policy group that advocates for raising the birthrate. “They know her smell, they know her heartbeat, they know her voice. I just think, why should we deny that?” —The New York Times, May 12, 2025

 

 

It is impossible for any situation to go on well where one is at the bottom who ought to be either independent or at the top. I am at the bottom and ought not be there. —Florence Nightingale, private note, 1851, in Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters

 

Lacking a penis, the young Florence Nightingale

had to satisfy herself with the yearly sorting of linens

and kitchen utensils. She noted, wryly, in her journal

that, as for the latter, form didn’t follow function—

she hadn’t the faintest idea of their use. She hoped,

that Capital, by creating a need for them, had allowed some

at least, to earn their bread. Luckily, proper scope

for her talents emerged in the war hospitals of Crimea.

 

Now, talk has again turned to what 

is “natural” for women—surprise—a predilection for babies

and scutwork. Out comes the myth, trailing dust,

that career women are selfish and their children unhappy.

Have we learned nothing since the Victorians—

that if unchosen, a woman’s home is her prison?

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press and Asterisk Magazine.

WHAT DOESN’T VANISH IF DENIED

by Devon Balwit

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Department of Commerce announces the end of $4 million in funding of climate risk projects at Princeton. —Daily Princetonian, April 9, 2025

The prevailing wisdom used to be to hide 

the ailment from the ailing and, in so euphemizing,

ease their dying, like a fringe of trees beside

the road used to mask clear-cutting.

 

But the patient, intimate with tumors and waning powers, 

knew, and felt the greater pain for all 

the smiling, for all the cheery cards and flowers,

and wondered at the falsehood, and was appalled.

 

And we, too, as we hear our current leaders

asking scholars to deny how far gone

we are so we mightn’t worry—as if our rivers

weren’t in flood or our homes burned to the lawns.

 

As if insisting there’s no such thing as gravity,

makes the times we’re living in less heavy.

Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

DO NOT

by Devon Balwit

after Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Cartoon by Custodio.

Do not
 
check the box saying I agree when you haven’t
read the terms, nor put an I believe sign in the front
yard while the yardless are being hauled out the back,
nor assume threat ugly rather than urbane and slick,
nor think one must sloganize to fight (for a lone wag
can be sufficiently ironical to shake the dog),
wor forget the power of art to move unfettered
by a common style, nor worry you must do it better
even to begin, nor avert from sure embarrassment—
for nothing embarrasses more than the human predicament—
our minds in compostable bodies, seeking the light
in the brief blip between birth and night.
Do not obey evil in advance, die
before you’re dead, or—worst of all—refuse to try.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

RUNNING THE GOOD RACE

by Devon Balwit

Edward Jenner Vaccinating a Boy 
Eugène-Ernest Hillemacher (1818–1887)
Image Credit: Wellcome Collection via Art UK

Fewster pondered milkmaids’ unmarred faces,
Jenner listened, testing cowpox pus
in the arm of his gardener’s boy with great success.
Others took up the baton—two centuries
of improvements: Gaston Ramon lancing horses,
noting some with greater immune response,
then raiding his pantry to find a substance
to stabilize their powerful antigens,
which Glenny then bettered with his alum salts.
All strove to thwart death in his race,
on the team of that impartial clarifier, science.
These days, virulence back with a vengeance,
how sad to lose the lead their diligence
gained, squandering the lives of our sons and daughters.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress. 

WHERE’S HERSH?

by Devon Balwit

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. —Philippe Arriès
 

I get out of bed and put on a costume 
of being a person, says his mom,
the number of days of his captivity taped to her bosom.
She speaks to anyone who’ll welcome 
her—President, talk show host, reporter. Numb
is not an option, not while her son might live. Come
home to us, she prays, her thumb
pressing her prayer book. She prays for Umm
Mohamed, Umm Sarah, Umm Ahmed as well. I can’t fathom
her loss, imagining my own son, who looks so like him,
stolen into captivity. Harm
has already come to Hersh, arm
blown off, 220 days and counting. The number
of dead in this war also multiplies, like the rubble. I watch gruesome
videos taken by an American-Palestinian doctor—hard to stomach—
ordinary people being overcome
by history. What can be done? שום דבר —shum
davar—it seems—nothing. But Rachel must keep her momentum.
This Memorial Day, let us insist, alongside her, upon Shalom.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and has recently returned to life-drawing and cartooning. She edits for Asimov Press.

2024 CAN BE A YEAR OF DELIGHT, PROMISES A TIMES COLUMNIST

by Devon Balwit

Quilter Delight Painting by Karla Gerard

The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you… Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) —Catherine Price, The New York Times, December 31, 2023

I hold up a finger and say Delight!—two shelf mushrooms

in a hollow tree, a squirrel hanging by its feet. I zoom

in on the electric green of moss, a red leaf peeking

from wood chips. Always the teacher’s pet, if seeking

wonder is the task, I’ll find it, if only for the gold

star next to my name on the chart. Behold

the shining face of a baby at the bar, the daffy

hound, a Beethoven riff that makes me laugh! 

 

Expressing simple gratitude does get old—

the litany of health, family, shelter—but marvels

are singular. Even the same street shifts

with the light. I read the essay to the end sold,

ready to dash out and see what’s revealed

as the world sheathes its terrors and bares its gifts.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and has rediscovered her love of cartooning. Her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], storms through Melville’s Moby Dick.

DESPITE MANY EDITS, THIS POEM REMAINS A SCREED

by Devon Balwit

Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times

 

Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023

 

What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden:

the living penned with the dead, vivisection,

 

infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine

you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton

 

cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red

meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated .

 

Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal

death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial

 

to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds

we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards

 

would span entire states were the hens to peck

at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark

 

ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy.

We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species:

 

Women, brown people, the poor—What

can one do? They just happened to draw the short

 

straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained

once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. 

WANTED: THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHIRT AND BLUE PANTS

by Devon Balwit

The National Park Service is seeking information on a man who interacted with a newborn bison calf, which it said had to be euthanized after it was rejected by its herd. Credit: Hellen Jack, The New York Times, May 24, 2023

who moved a bison calf, causing it to be rejected,

who, I can guarantee you, was responding to the pleas

of his children—Dad, you have to do something! Dad!—

the way I respond to the urgency in my own kids’

voices and go charging off to school to intervene

in a situation that becomes worse, not better,

me ignorant of the whole story as I struggle to haul

the bellower out of the mud and set things right

while the herd looks on from a distance and sniffs

the wind. That dad and I wipe our hands on our pants

thinking job well done, unaware that kid and calf

both bear the unshakeable stink of a meddler.

Editor’s update from BuzzFeed: A Canadian man who put a bison calf at Yellowstone National Park in his SUV, forcing officials to later euthanize it, has pleaded guilty and will be fined. Shamash Kassam picked up the bison calf because he thought it looked cold and assumed "it would have been roadkill" if he did not intervene. Thursday, Kassam pleaded guilty to a wildlife violation charge and was fined a total of $735, according to KTWO.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick.

WHAT PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY LATER

by Devon Balwit

The headlines scream of war and child labor,
the ways humans brutalize each other. The authors
hope to shame us out of apathy. Near
their blare gapes a book with a cow on the cover.
Her long-lashed eyes make this reader hunger
to press my face to hers. She’s been slaughtered,
one of tens of millions every year, numbers
too large to render back into individual creatures,
a fact, with our favorite and customary foods, we prefer
to ignore. We ought care more for human mothers
some argue—for farmers and workers, for the poor,
who cannot afford to eat ethically. Later
we can worry about animal welfare. Later, 
my friends, is a common synonym for never.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collection is Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023].

IN MY DEFENSE

a pantoum

by Devon Balwit

George Santos

I stand here, not a liar but a fabulist,

my doctored resumé no different than a photo filter,

a burnishing, an enhancement.

The self is always curated,

 

filtered depending

on mood and desired effect.

We expect an exhibition, an exhibitionist, to be curated—

people go to school for that,

 

making audiences cheer the desired effect.

Project success and success will follow.

Ordinary school, work, who wants that?

No one wants to be ordinary.

 

Success is a predictor of talent.

Have I got that backwards?

No one ordinary would have the balls

to do what I’ve done—exactly

 

the man you want, no looking backwards,

able to command seeming,

to calibrate popular resentments exactly,

unapologetically ruthless.

 

The whiners don’t seem to get how,

burnished and enhanced, a superhero,

I stand before them unapologetic,

not a liar but fabulous.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collections are We Are Procession Seismograph, [Nixes Mate Books, 2017], Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021] and Spirit Spout [forthcoming with Nixes Mate Books in 2023].

SPEAKING OF LEGACIES

by Devon Balwit

King Charles III built his own empire long before he inherited his mother’s. Charles, who formally acceded to the British throne on Saturday, spent half a century turning his royal estate into a billion-dollar portfolio and one of the most lucrative moneymakers in the royal family business. —The New York Times, September 13, 2022

Your average Brit pays to inherit. Not he.

King Charles gets his tax free,

 

the pelf of the Commonwealth studiously invested.

You’d think working folk would grow disgusted

 

at the granting of titles to Saudis for cash, the off-

shore holdings, the real-estate profits,

 

that they’d line up with fists raised rather than phones.

Why should HRH earn 28 million

 

last year alone when inflation’s at 10%?

Are we really so suckered by pageantry?

 

Imagine the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Cornwall

liquidated, the money put towards ending global

 

warming. Now that would be a worthy legacy—

one to send cheering crowds into the streets.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021].

REBOUND

by Devon Balwit

A mind in a body, we want

the body not to suffer,

but bodies must learn

 

what illness is. To avoid

unpleasantness is to leave them

vulnerable to reinfection.

 

How tempting are blister-packed

nostrums when better

is to roll in our fever sweat

 

and full inflammation, each cell

a diligent student

of never again.

Devon Balwit is trying to put her final days of isolation to good use and is crossing her fingers against her own rebound.

HERE, WHERE NOT EVEN THE LEAVES FLUTTER

by Devon Balwit

Bandaged and bloodied, a mum nurses the baby she saved from Russian shellfire by shielding the tot with her own body. Brave Olga—badly injured by shrapnel in Putin’s blitz on Kyiv—cradles her month-old child as a man thought to be her partner comforts them. Amazingly, the baby was believed to be unhurt thanks to the quick-thinking courage of its Ukrainian mother. The two were being cared for yesterday at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital. Journalist Anastasiia Lapatina, who works on English-language newspaper the Kyiv Independent, said the baby was well. —The U.S. Sun, March 19, 2022. See also story at Infobae.

Ratatatat—no bullets—just a flicker

making a morning ruckus on a chimney cap.

History is happening elsewhere. There

people breathe its stink, tweeze its shrapnel

from their skin, like the bloodied mother nursing her baby

on a hospital gurney. Even the old poet

has refugees blanketing his living room and library.

Post-barrage, survivors salvage what

they can. Each moment presents its immediate problem

to be solved—more life always the answer.

Here, the flicker quiets in slanted columns

of rain so gentle that not even the leaves flutter.

As in a fairy tale, I fight ensorcellment,

straining towards that distant bombardment.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021].

ANOTHER RAPID TEST

by Devon Balwit

The Biden Administration to Begin Distributing At-Home, Rapid COVID-⁠19 Tests to Americans for Free. Americans can order a test online HERE

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

But want to reassure, so swab away—

Another rapid test without a line.

 

The tests are nearly impossible to find.

We call around or treasure hunt all day.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

 

We hide our coughs from those who’d mind.

But none of us can forego pay.

Another rapid test without a line.

 

The law now makes tests free—how kind—

but where to find them? Hunt and pray.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

 

We’re three years into this new grind—

Vaccinated, boostered—the whole array.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

Another rapid test without a line.

 

When not teaching, Devon Balwit chases chickens in Portland, OR. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press, 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021]. 

AIR QUALITY INDEX: 519

by Devon Balwit

SEATTLE, WA - SEPTEMBER 12: A man wearing a mask walks along Kerry Park as smoke from wildfires fills the air on September 12, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. According to the National Weather Service, the air quality in Seattle remained at "unhealthy" levels Saturday after a large smoke cloud from wildfires on the West Coast settled over the area. (Photo by Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images via Seattle PI)

Take a deep breath, the meditation app advises—
I breathe in. I only cough a little.
I can’t see my chickens although I know they’re there.
The redwood’s ghostly one house over.

I breathe in. I only cough a little.
The front door gaps. We keep meaning to fix it.
The redwood’s ghostly one house over.
My usual view is lost to fog.

The front door gaps. We keep meaning to fix it.
Tendrils seep in, the smell of burning.
My usual view is lost to fog.
It’s like London in 1952.

Tendrils seep in, the smell of burning.
I wear a headlamp when I walk the dog.
It’s like London in 1952.
Thousands died. I don’t want to.

I wear a headlamp when I walk the dog.
I pray the coming rain will make a difference.
Thousands died. I don’t want to.
I worry for the mailman, the UPS lady with her dog biscuits.

I pray the coming rain will make a difference.
So many acres are aflame. The firefighters can’t be everywhere.
I worry for the mailman, the UPS lady with her dog biscuits.
The hummingbirds’ wings whisk smoke.

Too many acres are aflame. The firefighters can’t be everywhere.
I can’t see my chickens although I know they’re there.
The hummingbirds’ wings whisk smoke.
Take a deep breath, the meditation app advises—

When not teaching, Devon Balwit chases chickens in the Pacific Northwest. She has two collections forthcoming: Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press, 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2020]. 

TRAGEDY IN [...]

by Devon Balwit

Lebanese security forces confronted protesters during clashes in downtown Beirut on Saturday, following a demonstration against political leaders blamed for a deadly explosion in the city. Credit: Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times, August 9, 2020

The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die. And second, as in the Middle East, so increasingly in America: Everything is now politics—even the climate, even energy, even face masks in a pandemic. 

—Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, August 9, 2020

How does a city fall, how does a nation?
A raft of catastrophe floats in & is lashed
to a bollard & then forgotten, pleas for attention
ignored or handed on, fears quashed

beneath derision. Those at the helm creep
away in the dark after pocketing what they can.
Those who cannot leave tremble at the seep
of decay & instability, hoping to withstand

the blast that finally comes. Many won’t.
Their names will be added to a list, misspelled,
the list lost, their ashes scattered amidst
a hundred thousand livelihoods propelled

into calamity. Then, blistering recrimination
& grim survivors doing what must be done.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.