They told us stablecoins were the boring money,
the babysitter for capital during the storm,
a dollar wearing a costume so faint
you forgot it was even in costume.
Park it there, they said. It doesn't move.
It isn't supposed to move.

This month it moved eleven billion dollars' worth,
the biggest exodus since the summer a coin called itself
stable and then wasn't, and an algorithm
tried to hold a promise together with math
and failed the way promises fail:
quietly, then all at once, then forever.

My mother keeps cash in a drawer she calls
just in case money. Not investment money.
Not this-will-double money. Just in case.
She has never once believed a number
could be trusted to sit still.
I used to think that was old world thinking,
gold under floorboards, a habit from a country
where the bank could disappear overnight
and did, twice, in her lifetime.

Now I watch eleven billion dollars leave
the thing that promised to never leave,
rotating back into whatever felt like ground,
and I understand her drawer a little better.
Stable was always a story we agreed to tell
about a number, the way you agree
not to mention the exit
until everyone is already gone.