You’re all bite and no bark I laugh out as we tumble down the streets, your clunky shoes catching on the cracks of the sidewalk and goosebumps erupting off my arms and shooting into the night sky.
You mean I’m all bark and no bite you say back, accustomed to the way my tongue trips and twists over itself.
Except, no, I think I mean it. I’m good at barking, not so good at biting. Something about the reality of that terrifies me. So I look for the biters, the things that tear and rip.
I am all bark in the carefully curated straightened posture of my spine, my declarative, well I would never stand for that. When in reality, I’ll stand for anything, and fall for everything. A house of cards perpetually reaching, fluttering towards the ground. I am all bark in the quiet moments of two in the morning when my friend is throwing up and throwing up and I am sitting there: ass against cement floor, phone dead, staring at the cars on the hollowed streets flash by us. I sit there, head throbbing to the sound of retching, thinking about how I’m the person lying in wait. Flash through all ages where kids are drinking and undrinking and I am there on the periphery, ringed fingers tracing the edges of cups that I won’t drink and pretending I am brave enough to be reckless. But really, I’m just there to grab the bucket and hold your hair back.
Sometimes I’m scared lack of use will rot my teeth straight through. I worry the crooked one that sits perpendicular to my bottom front teeth will pop right out. I worry I’ll hold its thin body in my hand, a survivor of multiple cavities, and think about all the times I should’ve bitten straight through. Sometimes I worry about the fact that all my biting teeth are stolen from my biters and what happens when I need to grow my own.
Good teeth sing like Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Gentle becomes synonymous with meek, becomes synonymous with impressionable, becomes transparent. Un-gentleness, as it were, is my best friend reaching into my eight year old mouth with the confidence only an eight year old could have, and ripping tooth from bone. In the spaces where tooth had been freed from marrow, blood poured from its absence to my bowl of pho. The tooth was stubborn in its departure, and so I sat there, bleeding and compliant. Unafraid, she twisted and she tugged until she held its bloodied alabaster body in her hand. And there in my mouth was a brand new hole. I left the tooth under my pillow for the tooth fairy who gave me a dollar coin and when that new tooth came in, it had the fearless bite of the girl who pulled it out.
You are all bite and no bark because you are brave and you have survived enough to bite through the core. I love you infinitely for that.
Not all of my teeth are biting teeth. Some are rounded on their corners, a consequence of the girl who wrote me a letter when she missed me, who writes about the way I dress in her essays and the way I cook my vegetables in her poetry. Her teeth are gentle in a way that shows how she’s stopped biting through the things that hurt. She has always survived enough to be cautious in the ways that matter, in the ways that are recklessly compassionate.
I’m pushing out my crooked teeth and biting through you, I exclaim, tripping on the same crack.
You know I’m lying and tuck a lighter in my pocket for later. ▲
