The Blankness at the Edge by Devon Balwit

The Blankness at the Edge

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us
more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.                  (Margaret Atwood)

The bullets ping chips from walls and
enter sandbags with a dull staccato.

Head down, away from gaps no longer
veneered by glass, I am nothing

if not cautious. My memories live
only between cupped palms, face

pressed close. What I was has no place.
What I will be hunkers, undecided.

Alert to pretention and pretending,
snipers stand ready to drop the forgetful.

Still, daily, hunger drives me to probe.
The least scrap swells me bulbous,

an explosion of spores. I master
the mycelium creep, the age’s new

locomotion, the code of the like-
minded, the subtle semaphore.

Not whole, I’m proximate. Bone
piles remind me what’s worse.

​

Bio: Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/ Complicated (with the Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found here and in Cordite, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, Posit, and more.

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