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The Oracle of Fallen Baby Teeth

 

My father kept the house in the divorce.

A few years later a new woman moved in.

 

One night she made lasagna.

During dinner I bit into something hard,

and discovered a tooth in my food.

Shortly after someone else found one too.

I knew these teeth.

 

They were my baby teeth

that my mom had saved

in a small blue pastel

tupperwear container

with tightly fitting rubber lid,

(the kind you had to wiggle over the edges)

that sat on the top shelf

in the dark wooden cupboards

of the kitchen.

 

In dreams,

when teeth fall out,

it might indicate

that you are having trouble

holding things together.

It might suggest a lack of support.




Jennifer Lothrigel

levelheaded: The Oracle of Fallen Baby Teeth

 

Might be a very loose connection, but Jennifer Lothrigel’s poem reminds us of Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel.” There a house with a silent wife and human ears on the floor; here a house with a “new woman” and baby teeth scattered in the food. “The Colonel” is fiction underlying truth; “The Oracle” seemingly fiction but somehow you can’t be completely sure, and probably telling a truth as well.

 

The sentences grow longer: three one-liners followed by two double-liners followed by the nine-line third stanza making up a single sentence. The drama grows with the length of the sentences, as does the eeriness. The poem is dramatically effective while being rather factual: divorce, new woman, lasagna, teeth in one’s food, another’s. In the third stanza the teeth are revealed as either a physical or a metaphorical representation of the speaker’s memory of her mom. These are the speaker’s baby teeth, saved by her mom, discovered while trying to eat (read: survive, perhaps survive the divorce). While this psychological story is somewhat uncanny, the poem allows us to reasonably find solutions.

 

As we learn from the final stanza, the speaker is losing control. Perhaps she was dreaming the story told by the poem so far. She understands her rickety state of mind as the poem shifts into a couple more facts, an indirect cry for help or perhaps a pointing finger. “It might suggest a lack of support” is said to no one as far as we can tell, but still feels like it’s coming out of pain and maybe directed at someone. Support was called for, should have been given, but wasn’t.

 

This mixture of directness in the storytelling – the factual nature of it especially early on – along with the indirectness of the final stanza, creates for us a well-rounded reading experience, where we can pose our educated guesses, and connect to the speaker’s mental struggle. This “you” as in “you are having trouble” could be any of those: the speaker, the reader, or an enigmatic addressee, as in this “someone else” who bit into the blameless baby’s tooth.

 

 

– The Editors