Tara Shea Burke
The dentist offered you the mold of your teeth. Yes! you said, without a thought, hoping your teeth would look nice beside the jar of ashes, autopsy report, red velvet jewelry box filled with dead insect shells, the book of cadavers carefully sliced and spliced, on display between layers of thin glass. At night, you grind your teeth and it keeps you from dreams—your body clenched, all our bodies clenched as we put away the day’s labor, the way work feels amidst all our tiny apocalypses, the body beside you in bed that seems to forget, year upon year, your skin is something she once wanted against hers, just like the one in your bed before her. You read, relax your jaw, then forget. Repeat. Make space between tongue and teeth, between your body and everything. Your old dog curls into you and it could be good and easy. Each day, the same. But you have a thick wet brain in your skull that remembers—always a bit afraid—and signals down to the webbed, branched system of nerves beneath the skin. Worry into your tissues until skin prickles your little wispy hairs on end. Look around: There’s no danger here. These days, here in America in your body with your skin, the danger is not when the bombs will fall, though they will, whether someone will steal your food, though they should, how the systems collapse, though they are, slowly, collapsing—but all this inside. A nineties rave in your heart that won’t end—loud, manic chatter before dawn, all you thought you wanted and now, somehow, have: these quiet days, a kind partner who plans good meals, reads beside you, sips tea and understands, mostly, who you are. You’re safe, right? Dreams slip between your teeth and a truth so monstrous it howls beneath your bloodstream, deeper than the blood, deeper still, sings in opposition to such safety. How hungry it makes you—ravenous, really, as your teeth wear down to the bone.
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Tara Shea Burke is from Paris, Virginia, and teaches at VCU and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her poems were recently published in Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities Review. Lately, she’s absorbed in making shorter, surreal love poems, speculative stories, handmade quilted things, and clay houses.