Event Horizon

Verse for Stars

The little girls of the world whose fathers are crying
over the horror of their teeth, their faces broken open,
is more horrible not because they spill their guts out
but because the lament itself springs from vanity and
the resulting humiliation of having a wrecked the face
due to drugs, not for the fact that that the teeth (poor
lost ones!) are in and of themselves gone, and not for
knowing the little girls of their worlds are going home
now to rooms stern uncles rule, once their school bus
lurches to stop before the house, because, they explain,
their fathers are in drug school. These daddies cry from
shame for their wrecked teeth, spill their fears in heaps
onto little girl laps, nevermind
                                         nevermind that learning
how to use a knife starts in the kitchen. Or that teeth
sink into the apple once sliced. Or that baby teeth are
discovered much later by mothers who once hoarded
them as treasures so long they waited for them to be
lost. The tooth hangs for weeks, snagging the gum’s
line, goading the mother-watcher to yank it out swift.
Little girls are stars, their teeth star shards, and buses
are weaving the lengths of their pencil yellow bodies
in and out from between the hills around which roads
curve, shuddering to a stop every few minutes to drop
a few piecemeal children off before a driveway’s mouth.