Let's workshop this poem about a mother in poverty—poverty of perhaps prostitute proportions—and her makeshift routine of draining her infected gum cyst with skilled sucking maneuvers.
Dental Coverage
Jaw clenched
and left cheek flexed
in a tropey grin (cockeyed,
like a 16-bit beach bro),
bicuspid gum cyst
crushed by an irate thumb—
between her teeth
and over her tongue
a hard-up mom sucks
ritual spurts of sharp air
(tch tch, tch) to drain
that festering sour.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right).