He Flatters Me, by Devon Balwit

Femme, by Edouard Vuillard (France), 1908.

He Flatters Me

I am smudge, but somehow, the artist renders me
elegant,

a chiffon darkness on a heat-shimmering beach,
my aloneness

foregrounded, sightlines strengthening my distance
from the crowd. 

He swaddles us all with a gentleness 
reserved 

for the newly-born, cradling us 
where we are. 

A golden heat rests briefly on our heads 
before trickling 

elsewhere. Like any heliotrope, I turn 
towards it, marking 

where drops have fallen. I will gather them 
up

into a book, later to revisit the time 
I was so beautiful.

Devon Balwit
​
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks 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); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, Tule Review, The Ekphrastic Review; Noble Gas Quarterly; Muse A/Journal, and more. Please look for her on Facebook.