Tooth Gaps in the Archives

Note: Thank you to the editors of foglifter for first publishing this poem in Online Exclusives Issue 1.1. This poem is best viewed on desktop.

Tooth Gaps in the Archives

Each lost record is a tooth wrenched free. The clerk says,
Nothing’s missing, it was just never there, as I tongue the sockets
of my history, tasting rust where roots should grip.

No name like that here. Absence, she thinks, is a tidy void.

In the archives’ gut, water scars cling to files like plaque.
Folders from the ’27 flood sprout black mold, pages fused,
once-healthy teeth the state carves out, expendable.

The archivist, gloved and masked, pries them loose.

I stand barefaced, inhaling that too familiar scent
of what’s gone: someone’s everything, a curation snag,
deep in a cavity the state won’t probe.

Cross-filed between parishes, loss hums the drill’s song.

Our bodies hoard what paper sheds. Mémère slurs
her sister’s name, gone from frames, from files,
a splinter lodged in the roof of her mouth.

I inherit it raw, a gap tender as a cracked root.

In Plaquemines Parish, five cemeteries have molted
into the Gulf since ’32, plastic polyester flowers smothered
by smooth cordgrass and black rush, rising.

Call it nature’s clerking, but to me, it’s a canal through marrow.

The archivists scrap whatever won’t scan, tag misfits
miscellaneous, leave mandibles yawning in state-shined jars.
We’re keeping history for tomorrow, the manager boasts.

I ask, Whose? His smile, all teeth doesn’t reach his eyes.

I hoard my own memories, stubborn as a calcium deposit.
I bury names on higher ground. The state’s memory picks its keepers,
but my cells encode what they extract. I’m a wisdom tooth:

inflamed, crooked, pressing sideways through their no.

I tongue the sockets. I chart a map the state
can’t shred. My voice becomes a smuggler’s code
for dragging the missing home. This is my rite:

to name the gaps, to bare them, to spit the numb of forgetting back.