Risk Assessment
by Devon Balwit
Talkers: “You all right?”
The starched, inaccessible breast.
Sylvia Plath “Paralytic”
He tears up
the last page
of the exam,
and calls it
mismarked,
as if
I wouldn’t remember
the original,
prepared
by my own
hand, as if
his ready
ignorance
didn’t underscore
each red tick.
Every day,
he presents himself,
a glowering
storm front.
Worried
he could be
another shooter,
I never
turn my back.
Devon Balwit
Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and three collections out or forthcoming, among them: We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (A collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic); Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, The Carolina Quarterly, The Aeolian Harp Folio, The Free State Review, Sugar House Review, Peacock Journal, Eclectica, SWWIM, and more.