Sore Tongue Song
Among the features of normal people that I am lacking are four adult molars. Absence runs in my family. For two decades, four baby teeth resisted until their roots began to dissolve. One shattered during a birthday dinner to warn me. I schooled the others to show more grit. With every x-ray, the survivors dwindled, ever more shadowy, deformed. Finally, near my fiftieth Christmas, a second baby molar shivered into chunks. Collapse runs in my family. Cadaver-bone was sutured into my jaw, a post drilled, molds taken, a replacement glued into yellowing ranks. The surgeon sang “Uptown Girl.” Optimism does not run in my family. Its replacement is too large and juts into the cave where my tongue wants to sleep. Every morning, a pink muscle protests. We don’t want to inhabit me. I am sorry, I tell my tongue. Abyss is our inheritance. And defiance.