Devon Balwit
You Get What You Get
Somewhere between sweeping up dog hair and collecting
balled socks and underwear
from beneath dressers, between taking out the trash
and trimming the overgrown hedge,
between worrying about whether you can afford any college
your kids get into and why one’s socket hurts
a week after extraction, between obsessing about your party
dwindled to a single couple
and your realizing that the dog you love is not the dog
that will witness your dying,
you get news of an acquaintance’s poem, accepted
into Ploughshares, and you remember
Matthew 13:12, Whoever has will be given more,
and they will have an abundance.
Whoever does not have, even what they have
will be taken from them,
and you, an atheist, think, yes, certainly
it is like that.
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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