Today's poem is by Alejandro Lucero

Poem for my teeth. I can't keep / you
       

because you still grind yourselves into glass / powder just to wake me
each morning. You grew into spoiled wet dreams who knew / my mother
was dying before she did / her monthly stripping
for doctors; your quiet voice / the steady pang of my dull incisor. The texture
of her pinto beans dissolved / through our forks
before we could bite. Coated your crowns / in loose fibers clinging to their peel
like wet sheets. We couldn't catch / a nutrient. So we started eating
dollar deals out of brown paper bags. She only ordered herself / the fries. Teeth,
I let you turn off / -white like lotion rubbed into brown skin or a pill
-ow all sweat-stained from pent / -up mornings. Remember how
I licked the shovel-shaped backs / of you every time I saved Mom
and me a table, while she pissed away / her bloat. Liquor drenched
potatoes in the pockets / of her molars, you'd gnaw
holes into the meat of my cheek / when she'd leave
her ketchup splotches to buy another / plastic pint across Ruptura Street
You held my tongue / tightly caged, in your dental
arcade with no games. I couldn't / call her
back to our spot below / the arches. All my wisdoms
extracted, the first eighteen years with you were lessons / I ignored. Mournings
wasted, hoping for sex dreams to finish into that sad fabric / of cheap boxers.
To come alone, unconsciously, with only a blanket's / touch, Mom
wasting herself away on the other side / of that thin shared wall. I still reminisce
about my first / set. Your predecessors. The deciduous babies she
collected in that pill bottle with the label / picked clean.
Those small unstained beginnings / forced through
my gums. Snapped out peacefully / in the mealy neck
of a pear. Tugged / by the worn-down bristles of my brush. Dropped
into the black-hole crevice / of a McDonald's booth. I spent all the quarters
she left / on my nightstand. I write you broke
-n, searching, once more, for her profile / in a pile of change.
When you grew back, she started using / the word permanent. Dear sweet
pearls of my maw, she knew nothing / was.

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Copyright © 2023 Alejandro Lucero All rights reserved
from The Cincinnati Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission