Alexus Erin: "On the Occassion I Dreamt I Had Grown My Father's Teeth"

On the Occasion I Dreamt I Had Grown My Father’s Teeth

My mouth,
full of pebbles, bone shards
First they knew nothing
Then, saw everything
Fall, predetermined: tumbled and sold
for 20 dollars each
Delivered by things with wings. My teeth were lit
the colour of the wallpaper
in rooms where they laid, sun riding through
as I lifted the barrier: this Schrodinger’s Box
 
of a pillowcase.
In dreams, I get my money’s worth
Anxiety is a lack of object permanence, sleepy
Milk teeth worn as truth teeth. Daddy’s teeth are on holiday,
yawn devoid of white doors- only sculpturature
suspended, pink
Blown as glass in the nightmare art museum
Its dim corner staircase made to rot, to walk through soles, to
circle the mind stupid, to outrun the cops, to
wake up late for early, broker stocks in Tokyo.
 
As house is to mouth: Grandpa flossed the pipes
clean through drywall- some weeping,
some gnashing. My father, far more quotidian-
mayor of this district trashpile,
broke all the washroom porcelain; a series
of accidents. I watched
unharmed, mostly: gumming, hoarding
winter into spring, having repurposed
liquor bottles into candelabra. The gnats,
like Icarus: talking shit
before he remembered the heat

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Alexus Erin is an American poet, performer and relic of emo's third wave, living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, and a host of others. She was the 2018 Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screen-play, American Lotus Project, won an award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival. When Alexus isn’t writing, dancing, singing, comedy-ing, or researching maternal and child health, you can find her growing plants in your walls as the co-founder of Wallflower Hydroponics. She is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection.