The first time someone calls me
an adult child, I feel it, perfect
and discomfiting, I’m out of my depth
in autonomy, and I’m an amazon
pointed to a nursery school chair.
Adult child, someone says,
and I think of my friend’s mom.
In her childhood, she had I don’t know
how many cavities—one too many—
so her parents, weary of paying
the dentist, paid the dentist
to pull all her teeth. There’s more:
into her forties, this woman wore
the same outgrown maw, a set
of miniature dentures. I think of her,
savoring the unsuitable littleness
of her trick teeth, and I remember
the advance I received on my grin,
on my mother’s incisors, white doors
waiting to be hung. We’re all miscast:
some of us as a kid who can’t grow
into her mouth and some as a woman
issuing orders from a porcelain
apparatus too dinky for authority.
