I. molar winds
we wish hardest
in december, for
there’s ripe teeth
in the air tonight, from
the way a young and
cranky gust must poke
through blanket gums
to nip at our skin red and
cold, feeding on our
candied dreams once
an aged sun retires
earliest into the
crook of winter’s
distant but calling
cradle-song.
said dreams may
plume their brightest
after all when whipped
clear of the sulfur of doubt,
and into the teething mouth
of an aspiring gale
born from an earth
shackled to proceed
on its uneven birl,
while the crying wind
is left to soothe itself
by its own whistling
rendition of the same
cradle-song it had
once imagined, hoping
to extract the lyrics
from rows of our
unsung dreams.
II. toothstones
complacently i
received a deep
slumber in a february
that felt ordinary
only to me, before
our society became
a clamshell even,
and awoke in what
only to me felt
like months later to
an emphatic thud the
magnitude of orpheus,
so begrudgingly
discovering that sets
of uneven tombstones
had evicted my stained
and unfastened teeth,
their engravings already
vanishing from the
unconscious grinding of
unspeakable truths, but
tangible enough for
my tongue to read
me the eulogies
in tacet stillness
where i have since
groveled to teethe
anew no longer, and
where i have since
bargained with
apostrophe to have
kept dreaming
in blithe charade
for what was likely
many years long
before february’s fall.
