My Father’s False Teeth

I take my dinners alone, in my room, but I can still hear them through the door, my father’s false teeth clicking like a wooden gate with a metal latch, swinging open, swinging closed. In a water glass at night they float like an exhibit in formaldehyde of a stillborn child. The nightlight shining through the glass— a spelunker’s flashlight in an underwater cave illuminating the fossilized toothed beak of a fierce bird now extinct. My father’s false teeth, when he tries to spit in the toilet, fall in. Only my hand is small enough to reach underwater into the hole and pull them out from the pipe where they are wedged sideways, slightly open. Sometimes a woman expels from her womb something that is all hair and teeth. George Washington was said to always dine alone. His teeth were made of wood, whalebone, and mastodon ivory. My father’s false teeth, God’s first clumsy attempt at wings: two imprints of a horse’s hooves in red clay, hinged together, ringed with small square bones, too heavy to ever fly. My father’s false teeth in the click of computer keys in the tick tick of the eucalyptus outside the window as it twists out of its skin that falls on the pavement like sheets of parchment. A faraway splash in the middle of the night, I sit up in bed, startled— it was George Washington throwing something across the Delaware, not a coin, but his teeth.