THE EVOLVING CITY Jessica Haney   From the series Census 2000: Cincinnati Poems #23a. HOW DID THIS PERSON USUALLY GET TO WORK LAST WEEK? I look down on the highway from my third-floor balcony, and out at polluting gray smoke stacks of factories that turn out personal effects like shampoo and toothpaste. I obsess about birth defects from the sweet Seagram’s haze in a different flavor every week. The freight trains below make a ching sound that almost makes me ignore the cheap products they’re transporting all around the country. When I get to the ground floor, I brace my lungs for stale sewer air hanging in pockets near the front door where kids play on an abandoned chair one week, and later it’s a full-sized couch sitting out with no hesitation. Then just before the corner, I slouch past wilted, rejected carnations. Their buds feel like bird brains as I crush them under my shoe, but can’t make out the name of the woman who tossed down the stems or perhaps didn’t come home to claim her gift on the sidewalk. I head up the hill where cars rush past down or drag going up. Across the yellow line, heads of daffodils nod toward me and toward, on the ground, a B-cup blue satin bra that’s persisted under the snow with wrappers, cigarettes, Chinese food boxes, and the ripped lampshade stuck in the woods down below the cattail patch. But back up where the bra is and remains for weeks, I pause and I wonder if the breasts that filled it were winter translucent or if brown skin was held tight with its under- wire, and of course, I imagine just why it was sent out of a car window. I worry about her. I think of my students, invent crazy reasons. I find myself feeling sad once I’m sure that the bra is gone with the first mow of the season.   Jessica Haney holds an M.A. in English and an M.A. in women’s studies from the University of Cincinnati. Until the birth of her son in 2006, Jessica taught English and advised the literary magazine at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, where she also wrote curriculum and worked on issues of diversity in advanced classes. A native of Michigan and graduate of Kalamazoo College, Jessica is a member of the Bethesda Writer’s Center and has had poems published in Earth’s Daughters and Court Green. Published in Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 2007.