in memoriam for my aunt, Pauline Thyfault
After the viewing, they took her new false teeth,
inhumanly gleaming, out of her mouth, then slid
her body in the oven and turned up the flame.
They offered them to me as “a keepsake,
a remembrance,” but I turned them down:
all I wanted to see, all I wanted
to remember was the old wrecked Acropolis
of her shattered grin. She, whose soul had been
tight-jawed, gap-toothed, a cavity-drilled
dissenter, possessed in her new dentures
the permanent reminder of how all those years
she’d hidden her shamed smile. It was as if
the porcelain grins of the ones she called
the bosses, and hated with the purity
of a blowtorch cutting steel, had become her grin
mocking her from the water glass she soaked
them in at night, their perfect alignment
and corrected overbite become my little
nightmare, gnashing, tearing, hyperbolic
in their appetite, as if they embodied
hunger stripped of any satisfaction,
the anti-food of hunger hungering
to eat and eat never stopping, chewing
the void between each tooth to the least
nano of a nothing. Once, when I went
to see her and she still recalled her name,
I saw her staring at those teeth, saying
something like gobble gobble gobble but might
have been her mumbling nonsense syllables
while those teeth faced her down, square and perfect,
no jaw or skull to detract from their exactness,
knowing nothing of all her years driving Jersey’s
back country roads checking in on what she
called God’s beloved crazies though she didn’t
believe in God, nor did she see them as crazy—
the social services lady who went house
to house and got Millie out of her locked room,
took Charlie to a matinee where he pissed himself
and she had to clean him up in the Men’s
while the teenage ushers looked the other way.
Once she drove me to an abandoned house where
a dentist had his surgery, the chair still there,
kapok on the floor, even the little pedal
he pumped with his foot to drive the drill,
windows broken, stained posters of dancing
gleaming teeth as a hand without an arm
brushes that smile to little sparkles
leaping from too-pink gums. Just why or what
we did fades into my looking into
her mouth, at the wildly spaced voids between
each tooth as she talked to another lady;
but if you think I’m going to tell you
what I saw, play the little boy smitten
with the flawed, go back and read again:
I said nothing about her smile being
anything but a cause of shame, nothing
about a husband, a child, a female lover,
though she lived with a woman named Joy
who brought her anything but, haranguing her
in old age to change and change again
her paltry will. Instead, her dream of overcoming
the rich for the kingdom of the poor
all those years she hid her teeth behind her hand
vanished in one instant of these new damned teeth
that make everything taste like metal, as straight
and even as these pretty boy newscasters
shoving their perfect mugs into your face.
—Tom Sleigh
Tom Sleigh’s many books of poetry include Station Zed, Army Cats, and Space Walk. His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers, recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.
