Poetry Everywhere

 Above the window in the dentist’s officethrough which I watch sparrows pop aroundthe branches of a white light-laced pine treeIs that where the poetry is? a man on TV says,“Our President is a liar.” That’s not wherethe poetry is, is it? “Can I have nitrous?” I ask,a tear teetering. Is that where the poetry is?“Bad experiences?” she asks. There? “Very.”“You bite the inside of your cheeks in your sleep,”she noted, looking inside me with a light. “I tearmyself apart,” I strain my jaw to share the scars.Maybe there? “I would give it to you, but I justtook a pregnancy test. I don’t want anyone toknow, but I can’t be near nitrous. Let’s rescheduleyou with someone else,” she winked. There it is.“Oh…of course…congratulations.”____Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four books of poems. Her work has appeared four times in The Best American Poetry series as well as in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review. The Los Angeles Book Review said of her most recent book, Days of Shame & Failure, "This panopoly of twenty-first century American human experience leaves the reader a different person." She teaches at Iowa State University and is currently at work on a culinary memoir.