Egg Tooth
Ears are the eyes on the sides of your head.
Memory lives here, between these apostrophes.
As if to predict music, the ear contains a drum.
A musical note calling out for the shape of music.
For the coin in the slot to unlock the gears.
For the egg with a horse in it.
Some people are born addicted to sense.
Some are born infected with silence.
Poetry is an-ant-ant-anti-antibiotic.
“A horse pill.”
Yes, there is an actual horse in this pill.
Imagine it like a fetus pressed to the shell.
The reason there are no unicorns is just that.
This is the egg tooth.
And you, what did you pay to enter this world?
Copyright © 2025 by Benjamin Garcia. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I discovered my favorite ars poetica while doom-scrolling Instagram. A post crediting an anonymous fourth grader read: ‘A poem is an egg / with a horse in it.’ It made sense and it made no sense. A poem is an egg—yes. With a horse in it? Also, yes. But looking closer, the lines only grow stranger. Did they mean a little plastic horse from a toy capsule? Or a full grown horse from a gigantic egg? My poem today is inspired by a workshop I led with high school students where we asked: What else can the egg of a poem hold? Where else can we stash a horse?”
—Benjamin Garcia
Benjamin Garcia
Benjamin Garcia is a queer Latinx poet and the author of the collection Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed Editions, 2020), selected by Kazim Ali for the 2019 National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2023, Garcia was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2023, Garcia was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a faculty member in Alma College’s low-residency MFA program.