Michael Todd Steffen is the director of the Hastings Room Reading Series in Cambridge, Mass.. His latest book of poetry is Partner, Orchard and Day Moon that was published by Cervena Barva Press. His poems and articles have been published in many literary reviews in the United States and abroad. He has spent ten years living and teaching in France and England, an experience that has enriched his creativity. He was awarded the Somerville News Writers’ Festival Poetry prize.
The
Dentist
with
his little extended
circle
of a mirror
reached
into your darkness,
with
his fine sharp metal hook
mining
for resistance—and decay.
As
if the x-ray hadn’t shown him.
Who
puts their fingers
in
your mouth?—a layer of us
wonders,
reclined in his uneasy chair,
with
his concentration
of
a chess player to situate
or
remove, drill, crown…
Under
the angelic vanity:
my
jaw spiked with reminders
of
the original skull, our dust
whose
agony won’t outlast
though
bites down to measure
now—ow!—invention
of
the
moment and its isolating
pain
in the more probable
“rib”
of Adam God removed
like
a lisp
of
self-cultivated shrapnel,
that
we be recognizable
among
peers
with
enough missing from our smile
Very nice poem, Mike!
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