What teeth are clinging to my jaw
my mama gets the credit for.
She liked to whoop me any time
I went to bed before I brushed.
Some nights, she’d play Led Zeppelin’s
“Immigrant Song.” My toothbrush was
my hammer of the gods, she’d say,
and if I stopped my hammering
before Robert Plant stopped his, she had
a hammer of her own and she
would plant it on my backside. That
made brushing fun. I didn’t know
what half those lyrics meant, like “peace
and trust can win the day despite
all of your losing.” But that didn’t
much matter to the boy I was.
And keeping all my molars didn’t
particularly matter either.
I had a hammer and a horde
of germs to fight and that was all
I needed. Mama needed something
different. She needed peace of mind,
the kind that comes from knowing that
you gave your children something better
than what you got. She didn’t want
me carrying the curse, she’d say
whenever I’d complain about
this thing or other. Hell, if I
don’t know today what curse she meant.
I figure that’s the point—not having
to know the things I might’ve carried.
I’m guessing it’s to do with stories
she liked to tell about our roots.
We come from immigrants who settled
down here because land was cheap. They made
an honest start, but never reached
what you might call prosperity.
I know them more for what they lost:
lost homes, lost loves, lost reputations.
The way that mama used to put it,
if losing was a game, they’d beat
a suckled sow at feeding time.
She knew, because she inherited
that legacy of loss and wore
it in her mouth. She’d lost her teeth.
Yeah, every single one of them.
When I was just a suckling runt
myself, she’d had the last ones pulled.
We had so little in those days,
she liked to say her dentist was
a sturdy twist of twine, a well-
swung door, and a woman’s constitution.
That wasn’t really true, but still,
it put a healthy worry in
my belly, just the way she wanted.
She didn’t want me ending up
like her. But now that’s all I want—
not losing teeth like her, but losing
whatever things I lose the way
she did. After her stroke, when she
was laid up in the hospital,
my uncle brought some pictures from
my childhood. I told him it
was funny how my mama used
to keep her smile closed in pictures.
He told me then that she’d been nursing
a mouth of cavities for years
but couldn’t keep it up when I
was born. It cost too much to fix
them and it hurt too much to keep
them, so she had those suckers pulled
and learned to gum her food. It took
some years to get her dentures because
she couldn’t save and raise a boarish
boy at the same time. Uncle said
that Pawpaw sold his hunting rifles
to get his girl some dentures. Then,
some random neighbor left a thirty-
aught-six on Pawpaw’s porch. From time
to time, I think about these things,
the life I’ve had, with all the peace
and trust that I have known, and wonder
what things I’d do for those I love,
and how much it would look like losing.
Timothy Kleiser
Louisville