Teeth

In her skull the worn teeth sway like rocking chairs, swing like sanded doors,

chipped, cracked from feet tripping unknowing on the bank,

crumbled under the damp back and hiked up tee-shirt of

another mewling teeny-bopper with silver rings in her fat pink face. 

Beaten teeth still shuttering the throat where stories lodged and lived,

stained like burnt beetles, biting up into the pounded earth,

the rain rushed street rot and chemical weed-and-feed run-off,

the broken spillover bilge tank memories of a decades-dead

fifteen-year-old self, of tanned breasts rolling under terry cloth

and ass riding jacked high in jeans, riding along the planked walk,

riding to the beach, clutching the kicky blue and white broad-striped bag

full of cokes and Coppertone grease and condoms, plans, speculations.

Teeth that gleamed white like the rolling foam, like the ocean froth of the shaken can

of Schlitz, of Goebel, of Red, White and Blue, of the kick plate patriotic duty

inherent in peeling back the bathing suit layers for the cheap geek with the Trans Am

turned flat top and khaki uniform with a secreted deep Asia parlor tattoo.     

Lose teeth, witness to the panicked drag, the tires peeling back the scouring grains

the winding sheet of seaweed, the slow rock, rock, rock of the in and out tide

a picket fence for crab nest jawbones, fillings like mercury stars in the last light. 

Collingwood & Bancroft  

I dodged the view through intersections

haloed in the intermittent yellow red pulse

in the moth-dusted and past-twelve quiet,

until a naked man burst glistening

into the shocked street. His shaking hands

pressed damp on the hood as I stopped.

The red glow broke over him, 

glossing his chest and the low sling

of his curved back. As he fled to where

the shrubbery cast concealing shadows,

I touched my tongue to the sweat

that stained my upper lip.