Poetry: My Dentist Detects Occlusal Loss by Abbie Kiefer
Abbie Kiefer’s poem shoves the reader in their body, lights up that “spectral record of root and bone” we call the poetic experience. In today’s world, of screens and headsets and thin sheets of glass glued to metal in every pocket, what else can we more desperately want from a poem?
My Dentist Detects Occlusal Loss
In the x-ray I’m diaphanous
undone from flesh:
spectral record
of root and bone
enamel I can’t keep
from wearing
wish-thin.
He asks how often I wake
to aching.
I answer with teeth
that pestle their lacquer
with tongue that slicks back
the dust while I sleep.
Not an ache — it’s more
of a threading lament.
Still, teeth stay
after fire under dirt
pearled palmful in my sock drawer.
Little milk teeth unthreaded
with tender lament.
Oh, I’m tender
toward relics —
the dentist’s long-gone
lightbox and its bloomed panes
of film. The once-dim made discernible
in the open glow.
Now I tell myself
what I would say to my boys.
It will only sting a little.
You can be so brave. Just think
of how your teeth will shine.
When the chair cants toward level
my body follows. I let it.
I set my jaw soft
third time I’m asked.
Abbie Kiefer
Abbie Kiefer is a writer from New Hampshire. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Arts & Letters, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Poet Lore, Split Lip, and other places.
