All you need to know about me 
is I’ve broken three chairs in my life 
just by laughing in them. As in, 
splatted flat into sticks. Two more 
than could be considered mere chance. 
This amounts to portent, nay destiny. 
I am here to break chairs with my big laugh. 
Here to mar nice furniture in the name of play. 
I am here to keep guffawing even from the floor, 
having just busted my ass. I am here to milk the bit 
till everyone gasps and clutches their abs, too. 
All you need to know is once a friend 
read me so ruthlessly, startlingly true
that a bobby pin popped clean out 
of my ‘do and clinked on the floor, bright
and musical as the start of a giggle.

Each day I wake and run my tongue over my teeth
to check I haven’t ground them down all night to dust. 
So far it hasn’t happened yet, although I often dream
it has. In truth, my jaw stays clenched for hours
and their surfaces feel rougher than they did the day
before. Again this morning, I stretched and rose,

opened the blinds to the horizon’s apricot and rose,
and washed and lotioned my face and brushed my teeth
and verified their bite remains intact another day.
The tooth dream so real, it calls to mind my father’s dust
in its jar on the bookcase: how many thousands of hours
since he left. A thought, by contrast, preposterous as a dream.

In those last years, we talked sometimes about his life’s dream
and mine. From when I was a little girl, each day he rose
while the world was still dark, sat working at his desk hours
before the other staff arrived. I loved to make him smile with teeth
because he so seldom did, loved to breathe the sawdust
scent when he’d strike down a tree and chop it into stacks. Today

the last wood he ever piled into a heap sits by the drive, the day
he cut it forever fixed in time: decaying cord of logs. Futile dream
of one more fire where he’d throw on another one, bright dust
of sparks cascading up into the sky, while a moon rose
over Sugar Loaf. I consider the saw, think of how its teeth
can lay bare the heart of the tree, reveal its million hours

now at their close, in circles marking time. A dentist spent three hours
inside my rotten molar while I lay in his chair one summer day, 
winding the ruined root slowly, bit by bit, from out of one of my teeth.
The flow of nitrous through the mask held me inside a dream.
And later, there were no nerves left in that tooth when I rose
and reemerged into the drought-grayed trees and dust

of afternoon. The marquee reads WE MAKE OUR OWN SAWDUST
outside the salvage lumber place. Just that. No hours
or any other words. We really do, I muse. I pluck a wild rose
later from the verge of the woods out back, but within a day
it fades and droops, itself as clinging yet inconstant as a dream—
the bite of it still there, yes, in its stem full of keen teeth

though those too will in their turn succumb to dust. Another day 
is done. So many end with this or that unsettling dream.
Tomorrow, one day older, I’ll approach the mirror, smile, inspect my teeth.