Wresting Control

Wresting Control

I hit my baby teeth with a hammer to throw them in the compost.

I’ve stashed the small jewelry box five or six times this past year, after Mom brought it to me last spring,

and Hattie unearths it each time, presenting it to me as if it contains her favorite jelly beans.

She asks me what I’ll do with the little yellowed teeth, their roots posed like oak branches in air.

She shows me her teeth, spring’s first Snowdrops, Galanthus bright against thawing dirt. They’re beginning to wiggle, she says,

and doesn’t understand when I tell her the wiggle won’t really begin until six. She wants to play with my baby teeth,

but the falsetto voices she gives them pretending at tea parties grate— their voices ghosts from my childhood.

So, I hide them until this afternoon, hammer in hand, finally in control of my old cells’ demise.

They’re harder than I thought they’d be —harder than wood, metal, or plastic. They crack and bounce when I smash them

with the hammer against a board. I whack

little spirits from my youth: bologna sandwiches devoured by the bustling creek bed,

Christmas cookies sweeter because I still believed in Santa, watermelon savored while barefoot, lollipops presented by my dentist for good behavior.

The Mäori bury placentas to tether people to earth, bonded to ensure the health of both. I sit here alone hammering teeth like nails,

unsure if this is where I want to be tethered, unsure if it’s healthy to keep secreting these teeth until someone discovers them after my wake.

It’s a burden hording pieces of myself, but destruction and decomposition doesn’t seem easier.

A baby molar shoots across the garage floor. I stand to retrieve it, my bones cranky as I start my walk, my grown-up teeth self-conscious.

I retrieve my feisty tooth, take it back to its guillotine determined to hammer it into dusty calcium, dentine, enamel, cementum

that will help the Snowdrops bloom next year, these spirits let loose, finally, free to dance among the white bells.