—(…) 

 

 

Sad Tooth

 

 

Today I have been thinking about how much I miss your sad tooth, how much I love that sad tooth even still, the one with all the answers and clarity, hilarity, the one that could save the world if given the chance.

If you really want to know, I’m curled fetal here, folded for a box, glamorizing your sad tooth, its spellbinding slant like a barn door with one loose hinge, also rusted.

And we got rusted, too, right? That’s why the hollow shatter. That’s why the French exit. The bull’s on parade, the quake raining down every photo we’d ever hung, even the one where your sad tooth looked perfectly perfect.

(By the way, those are rhetorical, just like your teeth.) 

But that sad tooth, it was so loyal. It lay with me when I was sick or bored or unmoored. When I was high. As Neptune. Jupiter and Mars. Or as low as Pluto. When I was too adhesive and dismal. Too upright piano. Too uptight dehydrated bones. Your sad tooth told me all your secrets, even those you were too skittish to confess. I would just lean in while you slept, with its cinnamon breath and say, Don’t tell her I told you this but…

I wrote a poem (or maybe it was a letter, or a paragraph or haiku) to your sad tooth today, same as every day. I read it with breath then I read it silent, same as every day. Then I set it on the stove, turned the knob to 11, just to watch it burn.