TEETH

The holiest teeth live in the mouths of the things that don’t even have mouths, they don’t have cells.

Where do the little fangs slide in – what do they part, it’s regal the way flesh parts for them.

Flesh is a horrible thought (it’s wet and meaty and heavy and hot) but when you get down to the real substance everything flesh is gossamer, and pale. It’s vellum and light. Ingress and egress, nothing is trapped.

I haven’t brushed my teeth for four days and I can feel a kingdom gathering in the ditch between my gums and the enamel. Each day, it feels different, and I notice new outcroppings that weren’t there before.

I’m poorly and I haven’t been able to brush my teeth. The virus made me poorly but now there’s a rush of bacterial construction in my mouth that tastes like camel.

I’m mildly concerned about the dental work I had last October – I couldn’t afford it then and I can’t afford it now but my teeth, still without any cavities, were polished and scoured and it took me weeks to get used to them. I’m worried about losing the money that I put on my credit card, like how many days of no brushing would it take to make that scaling worth $20 less? A jagged edge of old plaque got left behind and scraped the leading point of my tongue every time I poked it in between my front bottom teeth. So, of course, I poked it a lot, until my tongue was like gravel.

I went to the dentist once when I was young and she pulled out so many of my teeth. She pulled out so many that I fainted in the toilet afterwards. They gave me a chunk of glucose to suck on when I came to and it was so weakly sweet I thought I would puke. For weeks afterward I would poke the damp sponge of the holes, the healing caverns where my teeth used to be. The pulpy flesh was sweet too, but metallic sweet. Strong sweet, not soft sweet like the glucose brick.

What I like about being sick in bed is watching my cat, the mean one, have a dream while she is curled up next to me. Her whiskers twitching and her little body jittering. I wonder if it’s a dream or a seizure and I wonder what I’d do if it was a seizure. Probably wait and watch. I’m good at watching.

Sometimes I find teeth in my car. Usually horse teeth I’ve found on the ground and absent mindedly picked up.

I know I should brush my teeth but I’m curious about the plaque growing there, and why I can feel it change every time I think about it. Does it recruit bacteria that quickly?

You see a dentist before you start cancer treatment because radiation around the head and neck can cause painful -

there is a risk of osteonecrosis in irradiated fields -

mucositis –

avascular necrosis affects people who drink too much alcohol –

I haven’t brushed my teeth in four days but I can’t smell my own breath. I never normally can. I smell my own armpits, though, hard, and I recognize that tang as stale sweat and bacteria. When I worked in the lab the smell of some genera of bacteria would make me hungry. The smell of sweaty horse is the smell of an adventure that might kill you, but what on earth is there to be concerned about considering everything that hasn’t already killed you?

I’m captivated by the wonderful orchestra of stenches and structures that my biology makes in collaboration with the smallest parts of me. I hack up painful phlegm that tastes thick, and like tobacco, even though I haven’t smoked in months. I swallow it back down, because it is mine. I wake up in the night, coughing around a scratchy, painful throat and lick the tears off my lips. I feel the contents of my stomach rise and fall and the waves of saliva coming, I could vomit. But I don’t. I hate to vomit.

All from my immune system, my immune response to holy teeth.

Four days. Some places smooth and slimy. Some places grainy and dark. Everything ends up fine and gossamer, no one is trapped.