Reasons We Have Teeth
The first
time pushed out of the mother: the second time shipped out of the mother
country in
five to seven business days: a journey from the womb is a North one:
a dream standing in a
corridor of a burning room: a light that travels at the
boiling point of a sweating tongue: a crib
nurturing a fried wing: a dream is a
coat of skin seasoned on the cutting board of a wall: teeth
wrap against my
voice in a cradle, in a kind of warehouse of cradles, in a kind of warehouse of
pregnant cushions laid out like bubble wrap loading cradles: to be human: the
doctors know
where I come from when I’m chewing the edge of a dollar bill on
the floor: a mother knows
where I belong when I’m lying on the floor: skins are
documents: the dream has razor suns that
grill skin like a polaroid becoming: I
lose my I.D. in the North facility book shelved with wallets:
we eat and we
sleep: to be born twice is a kind of cardboard freedom delivered by the Federal
Express: when you don’t like your food at home you visit a neighbor’s house:
bastards splitting
drums at a picnic table in a Kentucky Fried Chicken: a
freshly packaged mother who looks at
you with skin: born through a dream: eat
and sleep: the doctors probe my deliverer, my human
express: a shooting star
frozen in the atmosphere like a blister on the wall: black blood painted
the
dream: white sheets soaked in dreams: I have lunch with myself eating Kentucky
Fried
Chicken in the peripherals of my sleep: the vanilla smoke rotting when
tracing the curly-fried
strings of the law: pull your teeth out whenever you’re
hungry: the first tooth that digs its way
out is a dreamer, a bug-eyed bird
keeping the North up.
BIO
Kevin Garrido is a first generation Ecuadorian-American emerging poet, teacher, and Marxist. He currently resides in North Bergen, New Jersey. As an emerging poet, this is his first work to be published. He is also currently enrolled into the graduate program at Teachers College, Columbia University for English Education.
Twitter: @tmatosrdiowires