Poems by Devon Balwit

Consider the knee

and all it does — from the refined plié
or the speed skater’s lunge, to the everyday
going down of stairs or rising from a chair.
When it works, it’s something we ignore —
talking over its artful twisting as it accommodates
the roots on a trail. But the day it suddenly hurts,
we become devotees. Then, Saint Sebastian-like,
we are pierced with regret, yearning to go back
and worship the uncelebrated miracle of tendon
and meniscus. How do we reenter the garden?
We consult the scripture: video PTs,
who escort us through a new kind of liturgy
of foam rollers and reps. Prostrate, we beg
once again to be able to forget our legs.

Cast Out

No one’s going to want that book now,
except academics, perhaps. Too bad.
The stories, themselves, are good, but how
to forget what we know — what she knew. Horrid.
Out it goes into the Little Free Library,
ours, our neighbors’, as if some publisher’s special —
Buy one, get ten free! Count no man happy
until after his death, said Herodotus. Pull
wide the skin-flaps and give the skeleton
a close inspection. I presume there’s a hierarchy
of wrongs as in Dante — or even a common prison.
Perhaps, in some future century, like a dictator, she
will be rehabilitated. For now, as with an old photo,
we abjure we favored that laureate or eyeshadow.