Poem-a-Day

I wear my grandmother’s teeth on my wrist. She mostly  
used her teeth for smiling. Hi gang! Big and open, her whole 
arm scribing overhead in joy as we approached. Seems  
almost caricature, but it was real. She was real. I miss her. I don’t 

know how she stayed, after all her losses, so cheerful, alone.  
Decades alone, widowed young, alone by choice 
in her bed. The teeth I wear are not from her mouth, but  
from a jaw older maybe even than humans: walrus, fossilized, 

bought before I was born that time she and her husband 
flew a small plane they could borrow cheap, thanks to  
his job at Boeing—details, details, the small gold chain 
that double-checks the bracelet’s clasp, how much security

the details give us—to Alaska. My goodness, the romance,  
the time, their lucky, white, poor and upwardly mobile, just- 
post-depression, educated selves. Those teeth of hers  
I wear are not recently of ocean or ice, and absolutely not 

of this new ocean, this new thin ice, but dug from earth  
and browned by earth, the rest of their original life gone. The  
nerves and blood, the soft gums, the sensitive, broad 
mystacial pad and its seeking whiskers. My grandmother 

wasn’t like a fossil, which is what some people get called  
when they get old. In the care home where she lived  
for a few years or months (time blurs), they said her smile hid  
her decline. I think again about the pass politeness, rote

manners, can give—their grace or shroud. Inside my mouth,  
all my teeth sit still in their sockets, minus little bits which, in some  
cases, are filled with expensive compounds my grandmother’s 
daughter could afford and which I did not tend or value

enough when their care became mine. I know how loose  
teeth can be when a life hasn’t held them or when life’s flush  
fades, when the flesh sags off. I’ve found so many seal jaws,  
dolphin jaws, porpoise jaws on the beach, in dunes, and, 

whether I pocket anything or not, I always wiggle them  
in their ragged sockets, count the cusps, touch each point, which  
tells me not what they said but who, as a species, they were.  
Are.  Hi, gang!  So sweet, so eager to see even our shitty, selfish 

teenage selves. Inside my mouth, there’s a whole lot  
of impolite, but I know how to close my lips around it.  
The teeth on my wrist from my grandmother might  
be fragile. I don’t know and can’t unless I try to break 

them. She was such a joyous force. She was such a joyous  
force. It makes me afraid to pull the bracelet over the knob  
of my wrist, to stretch the old elastic, because I have lost  
so much joy already, which is entirely my fault. She seemed, 

to me, to always be vibrant with care. The teeth are loose  
on my wrist. Once, someone put her finger on the small  
spur no one notices below the last knuckle of my hand and  
that is why I bought a different bracelet that touches me 

where she touched me, with the same, delicate precision.  
I hardly ever wear the other bracelet, the teeth, which  
are really little squares, like lozenges to ease a throat, and 
haven’t I been sore-voiced?  Hey, gang!  Her arms waving

like she was guiding a plane to the gate. The way  
she would love whoever saw her. Really. Whoever.