After Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon’s Syzygy



1.

Gone:

eighteen years of diminutives.

What do I call you now

to represent our new alliance?

What treat does this name represent?

I must learn a new routine,

in concert with the pain in my tooth,

my heart throbbing in my jaw and neck when I bend forward.

White tombstone pills dull the ache to a subtle throb.
But.

There is no panacea for what else ails me.
Last night you knocked on my bedroom door,

sudden politeness that chilled more than epithets.

My name a single syllable

lobbed from your mouth to the waiting air.
2.

At the dentist

I sit, still as the deep of water

in his chair.

Quiet as he prods painfully in my mouth

with pick, alongside the bitter mewing of a miniature saw.

Salt water runs down my throat.
I nearly drown
as I am flung forward into a windswept landscape.

Seabirds caw mournfully, flapping

figures of eight

in every direction. 
His overhead light shines,

its stretched, non-human arm clean and clear on my face.

This is his fourth attempt, and I am losing my nerve:

as he repeats
this shouldn’t hurt but you will feel some 

pressure.
3.

I don’t know if you are pulling me, or I am pulling you.
4.

He balances, rotates his wrist

in self-contained circles,

hideous grinding in my jaw,

focused attention,

gentling me with soothed murmurs

as I gasp and flap

like a wild bird

trying to escape

the hunter’s gun.
5.

We are trying to burn and bury

this thing between us,

all these years

rising phoenix-like

two wild creatures spooked

by their own shadows.
6.

He finally succeeds,

wet, bloody hole where a molar was.

I can’t help the tears, the crack of an eggshell

split asunder yolk

and heart

pulsing

then and then and then again.