Tooth Box

A keep-safe for a keep-sake of a child,
a fragile capsule for caging time.
Made of milk-thin porcelain that
a careless hand could put a thumb through,
the box on the dresser top, painted with a
red-eyed rabbit and bordered with a line
of gold so old it has rubbed away in places,
worried by fingertips or years, or fingertips and years,
and at night, its blue-white-translucence becomes
soft light, and who knows whose mother
may have carried it across what wet black sea full
of monsters and through what wet black forest full
of men ready to murder any they encountered.

Is it true, or a story, or a story built from the sticks
and bleached and brittle bones of a truth died and
scattered, that fur trappers would string up rivals
in makeshift sacks shaped from poor-quality skins and
light a fire underneath to serve a slow, long-suffering death?

Our step-grandmother, with her peaked aubergine brows
and red-black mouth—draw up, she said, at the mirror—
lift the face and pick one feature to feature—
would sit on the bed that had been her sister the nun’s,
when her sister the nun had been brought home to die,
where we lay still like skeletons under white sheets
ironed, starched stiff, pulled over our shoulders and
tucked tightly around us, and our step-grandmother
would tell us stories about girls who had become animals
to save themselves, the hot blood blanket of a skin
so new to death it heaved and shuddered
across the thin back it concealed:
Donkey Skin, and Porcupine Skin,
and Seal Skin, and Horse Skin—girls,
like we were girls, transformed to undesirable,
or untouchable, too slippery, or too fast to catch.

On the pond where we skated in tight figure-eights,
pretending we were the mechanical girls in a music box,
underneath the hardened skin of milk-white ice
that we pretended was a cut of mirror simulating ice,
a man had set snare traps for the beavers
and we fished them up and swung them
between us—one for the money, two for the show,
three to get ready, four to go—
and team-work tossed them deep into the
blackberry brambles to save the animals a slow death
by drowning, noosed cold under the water that was their home.

When the man who set the snares came across us,
he carried with him a pipe laid over his shoulder like a club—
to finish, I am certain, any killing the wire nooses had not.
Hey, and he came fast through the tall frozen grass,
the blades chiming ice-skin against ice-skin—hey, you
dumb little bitches, you dumb little cunts, I’ll feed you
your fucking teeth.

We had been taught danger, the white flag
of a doe’s tail, in deer, the signal to flee,
in men, the signal of surrender. We had been
taught first flight and then to shelter, concealed,
the safety of a sister’s-pinky playing mother’s-nipple
in the baby’s mouth to keep it from crying out,
from giving away the hiding place of the helpless.

What scared me most was not the man, how he
came at us in violence, but how the girl beside me,
in response, knelt and wrenched a skate from her foot,
and shoving up, held it blade-out ready to slash or stab,
ready to fight, and how after all my little life of us
side-by-side, two, the girls, the same, a set, nature’s
made match, she was another thing entirely.

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