“The Sound of Roots” and other poems

We come from the mountains, we have wolf
in our blood, we have pinebarb. It is our cabinteeth,
we have shotguncousins and dirtdress babies
and when they holler pitchblack in the woods, their maws
are filled with broken knuckles. There are Mason rings
in their molars. We have sold our teeth for tar.

There is a snaggletooth in my eardrum. It belongs
to my greatgreatgrandmothers, who mixed scratch
with driedblood blessings and tried to stick
Eucharists to the ribs of their floursack children.
This is why we all grew up plump, this is why
I vomit out back behind the shed — so my mother
can remember the birchbranch ribs of her baby sister
who too often got caught in her father’s beartrap
teeth, his flyhook hands. Seventeen years before
she would beartrap a bullet into her clutteredcabin throat.

I’m sorry, mama, but some of her teeth
got splintered into the walls of my room,
they are the bones in my ears.
I used to believe my musclememory
was learned through this gracelaced hammer,
all mine, each curse a carving in my bedposts.
But even this bed is hers and my armored shoulders
have hung in our women’s closets for centuries, twitching
at the slamming of doors. They are quilts lain over
loveletterless chests and beaten in the winter to release
the dust, then draped over our daughters as if to bury
them in mountain snow.

But we are not as clean as moonshine.
When the folks in town spit our name,
it is a tooth punched from their gums by whispers.
Gapped sneers are clan insignia of riflerousers
drinking to the impact of recoil and the cum of myths.

So our fence is bricked with canines and we pierce
our daughters’ ears with incisors. Only the wolfboys come
howling. Out back behind the cabin’s neck, there is a plot
of gunpowder earth and like damning a newborn’s name
into our family bible, we are each to lay a tooth into a time capsule.