Our Bodies a Bulb in the Cold (A Cento) by Devon Balwitt

Wintering in a dark without windows,

it is Tate and Lyle we live on, instead of flowers.

We ball in a mass,

Black

Mind against all that white,

 

solitary confinement our Bodhi Tree,

isolation our mountain, doing hole-time

like retreating to the wilderness,

everything of value

carried without hands.

 

We chose to swim by turning

inward, a depth in our being

we can tap into. What

will they taste of,

our Christmas Roses?

 

 

(sutured from Sylvia Plath’s “Wintering” and Craig Ross & Steve Champion’s “Everything of Value You Must Carry Without Hands”)

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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 in Cordite, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, The Inflectionist Review, Posit, and more.