A Woman Scorned

by Devon Balwit

            “Reports that a woman was arrested after training squirrels to attack          

            her ex-boyfriend are false. No such incident occurred…” (Business2Community)

Nowhere now safe for you. If I could train

the ground itself to flinch at your step,

you would plummet to magma. The wind

would slap at you, dry leaves flensing.

Instead, I’ve recruited the small things,

the wire walkers, the nut gatherers.

Their chittering coded, they alert

the canopy: you with your new love

on a picnic blanket. Hitchcockian,

they come in phalanx, tails lifted like

pennants. Think of me with each bite,

a rancor that leaves you faceless.

* * * * *

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, The Fourth River; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Noble Gas Quarterly; Muse A/Journal, and more.