Photo by chessboard35

Teeth, glamorous teeth.
Whiter than white: glint.

How can you call a color
a word? Flimsy netting

of the exuberant verb of it—
all swan and longing and snow.

But we were talking about
teeth, how I stole one

from my first-grade class,
decomposing in a dirt-colored

glass of Coke next to another tooth
in Pepsi and another in Sprite.

Something there is that loves
a tooth, even though no

dollar bill would be slipped
under my blood-stained pillow.

Whose tooth didn’t matter.
I was dreamy and six

and a circle of my hair
had fallen out by the roots.

We were all disintegrating
and this was proof:

the war had just begun.