Devon Balwit | I Can’t Seem to Avoid Her

I Can’t Seem to Avoid Her: poems by Devon Balwit. Number 7 in Volume Six of our Editor’s Series.

[ cover artwork by the author ]

Publication:  September 26, 2026 [100 copies]
21 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-39-6
$ 12.00

When not making art, Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press and Works in Progress Magazine. She is the author of numerous chapbooks, including Forms Most Marvelous (Dancing Girl, 2017), How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck, 2017), In Front of the Elements & Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books, 2017), Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books, 2017), The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry, 2017), Risk Being/ Complicated (self-published with Lorette Luzajic, 2017), We Are Procession, Seismograph; Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang; and Spirit Spout (Nixes Mate, 2017, 2021,  and 2023), A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus, 2018),  and Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats (Seven Kitchens, 2020).

For more of her work, please visit her website here.

Proprioception

A stair with space for just one foot at a time,
no guardrails, speaks to us of home.

We learned where to grip and where to lean —
(mom wasn’t always grim, nor dad mean).

The landing wasn’t always dark. The squeak
of risers could herald scolding but also the music

of a sibling’s whisper. The brain is made to remember
after being smacked in the face by a bellicose corner —

It won’t happen again. And later, when we visit
houses where the stairs are predictable and placid,

we’re bored. Just as when others visit
ours, they’re horrified. How did we survive it?

Survive what? We adapt to the architecture.
Even in the darkest dark, we’re fleet as dancers.

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