My wisdom teeth exist in pickled beauty, in a gold-capped mason jar. I take great delight in looking at all that lost wisdom every morning. They don’t haunt me— not like the colon they removed in a total colectomy, incinerated at the height of the pandemic— no goodbye, no ceremony, not even one last proper shit.
But those teeth, they have potential— to evolve into something wonderfully grotesque, something beyond just seeing a cloud in a cloud— not just nostalgia mistaken for depth, not mistaking every blur for meaning. These baa—shh-fully fleecy things— have the roots of sheep birthing themselves from the soft enamel reality of my fears and hopes.
Their mandibles absurdly ruminate on the glass, crying to be unscrewed and rumpus the carpet, desiccate the lawn. “Dickey, Dickey, Dickey,” they bleat— grunt ruts to the dusty corner seeking to mount the motes of slough epidermis, crying for their myth-sire, that backwoods god with a butcher’s pen— Dickey, who first sketched wool into womb,
I uncap the jar. Let them loose. They scuttle softly beneath the sink, their pearl mouths bleating the language of dust motes, skin and tupping.
I observe them under the panels, opened wide- shaggy and luminous- shearing each other with molar-clippers.
When they are done, they rap on the jar, ask politely to go back in. The glass fogs slightly as I watch them sink, silently, slowly in the salty brine— punctuation marks drifting aimlessly, seeking their place, in the sentence I’ll never finish.
I wipe the jar clean, pondering the possibility of whether I will ever let these gentle monsters ever loose again.
Their dentin stares at me lovingly, adoringly, trustingly, not pleading, just faithfully believing I will make the right decision.
They hope I will become something wonderful, create something wonderful with them, become wonderfully wise by constant subtraction and reunion. They did not see the nonsense of their hopes.
I put them back on the shelf besides my desk— consigning them to my museum of hurts endured and insights extracted, these fossilized half moons extracted from a mouth that never quite closed around love.
These things I can hold to the light and see reflected my every wise/unwise decision. They do not speak but I know they listen better than I do.
At nights, when I ground sleep to salt, I hear them calling to me— “I am still part of your jaw. You chew with our shadow.”
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