Devon Balwit
The Shapes Money Takes When It Freezes
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
—Margaret Atwood
Money sleeps soundly, secure
in its profusion, hurtling
ever shoreward, like the tide,
turning in fixed orbit
around a density, the molten
core of a flung star, only the slightest
axial tilt marking its seasons,
sitting at the center of small
moons and asteroids, hangers-on
drawn by the chest-puff
of entitlement, the lifted nose, the glances
slicing as down a slalom slope
before pivoting a spray
of ice-crystals that sting the eyes
of the watchers behind the ropes,
you and I.
Devon Balwit is the author of A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poets Reading the News, The NewVerse News, The Ekphrastic Review, Peacock Journal, and more. For more of her poetry, reviews, collections, and chapbooks, visit her website, devonbalwitpoet.
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