A Sense of Balance
Mary K. Hawley

My dentist has an office in a building
full of dentists, so people on the elevator
mumble and drool.  I wonder what he’s thinking
when his fingers are in my mouth.  I’ve never
stabbed anyone but once I dropped a knife
down a man’s back.  The surprise of metal
against his spine made him dance even better.

I want to be touched the way the sales clerk
runs her hands over clothes, teasing out
the folds, piling garments if soft heaps
on the counter.  But then she slides them
into bags and hands them over, checking
the clock on the register.

A few blocks from here the dead man’s house
had loaded guns at every window.  Finding
a balance is hard: the murder rate versus
the matching outfits.  In subdivisions houses circle
like wagon trains, warding off whatever slinks
along the edges of the blacktop.

Sometimes I don’t know what I’m seeing,
shapes resist their meaning.  On the highway
a red car rounding a curve suddenly lifts
upright, shows its black belly, then topples back
on itself like a wounded beast.  I almost keep
going, as if the wreck were an empty sign.

I haven’t found the atlas for this trip.  I can’t tell
if the neighbors upstairs are fighting, having sex,
or watching the game.  One night my husband says
I never saw the northern lights in the city before.
He stabs his finger at a sky streaked yellow
by clouds or maybe pollution.  I stare upward
until it shimmers for me too.