and you want to get tough,
rip bottle caps off
with your teeth,
tattoo “pure pain”
across your knuckles
sleep when you’re dead
join a club
you can’t talk about
drink coffee
as black as your right eye.
And instead,
what you get
is a night guard
for your TMJ…
there’s a thick rubber band
wrapped across
my forehead
& temples
& to the back
& it’s so fucking tight
it feels like two fists
pushing against my skull
in a race
to the other side —
the pain isn’t scaleable, doc,
it isn’t measured in scales,
it’s measured by
…
“moley! moley! moley!” yelled derek, my crush, in front of our 4th-grade class as we walked to the busses. luke whispered to me, “they look like chocolate chips & i want to lick them off your face,” during 7th grade passing period next to the blue lockers.
as the dermatologist…
