Your Tooth Fairy Apologizes

I never showed you where I kept your baby teeth

In a small silver vial

Topped by a golden-winged fairy
Who extends a tiny star-tipped wand

Entire vessel just 2-1/4” tall from base to fairy bun

I hid her in my bedroom on a high closet shelf

In a lidded box filled with fancy, rarely worn lingerie

Concealed in a tangle of lace-trimmed slips, camisoles, petti pants, tap shorts

And silk scarves

It might have crossed my mind to show you her

When you were a teen or so

But you weren’t the kind of kid who’d be enchanted

You’d just scoff and be embarrassed

In your 20s you may have marveled and been charmed

Perhaps given it a primary-tooth-rattling shake

But by then you were off working and traveling

Between life-threatening bouts of acute disease

And at the end, when you came home to hospice in your childhood room

This treasured reliquary filled with your precious baby teeth

Might just have been a god-damned reminder of

The six fucking adult teeth doctors cut out of your left jaw

In excruciating surgery and radiation for secondary cancer there

Randi Rohde

(To Ian)