Feel the backs of your teeth with
your tongue
and forget the familiar sensation of every overlap and
slightly crooked cusp for a moment to
make way for the shade of the muscle
memory of the
gaps, the holes once there, years since grown in with
big and strong adult teeth. Once empty but for soft tissue,
slight copper taste, the boundaries of the
surrounding teeth.
Feel again when your teeth wiggled first
under pressure of
your fingers, next the push of your tongue and then the
satisfaction of pulling out a loose object.
A letting-go-of,
making-way-for later younger versions
of now-teeth
pushing up and out and new but you were born with these teeth
already
underneath,
part of your jaw
was always
hiding these
strange molars and
canines and
incisors once waiting
To be where they are now and you
sometimes forget they were not
always there.