Notes About The Poem
This is an exploration of a childhood myth turned into a sprawling, subterranean urban nightmare.
Calcium Metropolis
Let’s be honest, the Tooth Fairy is running a racket.
A dime? A quarter? In this economy?
For premium, organic jaw-bone?
Please.
They aren't sitting in some velvet-lined jewelry box in the sky.
No, I know exactly what’s happening.
Right now, under my hallway floorboards,
there is a tiny, terrifying Richmond made entirely of my old body parts.
A calcium metropolis is thriving in the dark.
Skyscrapers built out of my childhood bicuspids,
little marble parks paved with pulverized molars,
maybe a tiny gothic cathedral held up by that one canine
I snapped off on a playground gravel pit in 1998.
I walk to the bathroom at 2 AM with a softer tread now,
wondering if the foundations recognize my weight.
Like, “Hey look, guys, it’s the landlord.
The guy who used to tuck us under his pillow.”
The wisdom teeth I surrendered to a guy named Dr. Rick
are probably the ugly government buildings down there,
holding up the joists, bearing the literal weight of my bad posture.
They’ve probably got a zoning committee down there,
aggressively debating where to put the new root canal district,
while some tiny tooth-mayor cuts a ribbon on a bridge
made entirely from my middle-school sports injuries.
And what about the coffee? The sheer amount of caffeine
seeped into these foundations over thirty-some years?
The whole city is probably vibrating at a toxic frequency,
a bunch of hyperactive enamel junkies shouting at the plumbing.
I bet they have a historical museum dedicated entirely to the Great Laffy Taffy Incident of 2004,
featuring a dramatic, slow-motion exhibit of the day
a piece of pink, artificial banana flavor
ripped a silver filling straight out of its home.
There’s definitely a sketchy, dimly lit dive bar called The Plaque,
where rogue incisors get absolutely hammered on mouthwash
and complain about the time I tried to use them to open a beer bottle.
“He has a bottle opener on his keychain!” they scream into the dark. “A keychain!”
I bet the baby teeth are running around like tiny, immortal toddlers,
completely feral because they never evolved roots,
marking graffiti on the water pipes with leftover fluoride
and throwing bricks of tartar at the passing dust motes.
And god forbid they ever unionize.
Imagine waking up to a tiny, muffled protest from the crawlspace:
“What do we want? More calcium! When do we want it? Stop drinking so much soda, Chris!”
Honestly, I’m living above a microscopic labor dispute.
Do they miss the good stuff?
Do they have a tiny monument dedicated to the ghost of summer peaches
or the burnt sugar of thirty-some birthday cakes?
Or are they just glad to be retired from the nightly grind of my jaw?
The floor shifts. The house settles.
But I know it’s just my old skeleton down there,
building a real estate empire out of dust,
humming quietly beneath my boots.
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