Abigale Tabor
ON CAKEHOLE
My coworker says her mother saved every tooth—
baby, pulled, lost to popcorn kernels and bad timing—
because the mouth is a bank vault for futures.
Because inside enamel: a little gospel of stem cells,
because if my coworker dies first her mother plans
to grow her back. Tell me that isn’t love. The mouth
remembers everything: the first lie you practiced
with your tongue, the metal taste of fear, the way God
snuck in once wearing your best friend’s laugh.
I tell her this outright—I see God in you—
and my cakehole doesn’t combust, the sky doesn’t
invoice me for its rain. The trees we grew up with don’t
flinch. They have not forgotten us. They’ve been holding
our names in their rings like quarters for the ferry.
Some days I can feel myself nearing the edge of what
my medication can do for me—outpacing it, really—
my mouth running faster than chemistry, prayers spilling
before the pills dissolve. I open my cakehole and there it is
again: panic, praise, hunger, a song I didn’t know I knew.
It’s just me, Kate Bush, and Sisyphus going up this hill—
her voice keening, his hands chalked white, my mouth
full of gravel and chorus. We keep climbing because
the mouth says again. Because the mouth says sing it
one more time. There’s a bumper sticker on a rusted
Corolla at the light: MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM
and I laugh so hard I almost lose another tooth, another
potential resurrection. Save it, I think. Put it in a labeled bag.
If I go before you, grow me back from the mouth—from this
cakehole that tried its best to hold God, to hold my friends,
to hold the impossible weight of love without spitting it out.
Abigale Tabor is a graduate student at Florida State University pursuing her MFA in poetry. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming in Belletrist, Arkansas International, Burningword Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She can be found at abigaletabor.com. When not writing, she is likely taxidermying mice and rats, pinning bugs, making oddball pies, or hanging out with her dogs and husband.