Holly Day

The Tooth Fairy Dreams of an Apocalypse

It’s all there for free now, all there for her
swooping down in plain sight, in
broad daylight, hands out in hungry claws pulling
all those lovely teeth loose. No more need for

fancy hairdos, or sparkly
pink dresses, or even
the crystal scepter, now that there are no more
insomniac children left to catch her in the act.
She can wear anything she
wants now, jeans, a t-shirt, a backwards baseball cap, a

food-splattered muumuu, or even nothing at all.
Nobody’s left to see her do her work, tugging
stubborn teeth free from blast-cleaned skulls
with a rusty set of pliers, a
string tied to an anvil, an old claw hammer.

It’s all there for free now. No more
dollars to leave for teeth.

My Husband Comments On How I’ve Let Myself Go

he tells me I remind him
of a beached whale lying in
bed in the morning I close my
eyes and imagine myself
being picked apart by the claws of
tiny sand crabs burrowed into
by thin red beach worms
gobbets of flesh ripped

from my carcass by flocks of sea gulls
luring even the raccoons down
from the stubby forest
following the shore. he asks me
if I feel ashamed of myself
and I don’t answer because
I feel dead already I’m
too busy

imagining the shock of
girl scout troops stumbling across
my massive corpse in the shallows
the feel of their tiny hands
on my body joined by the larger hands
of Greenpeace workers and passing
tree huggers as they try
to push me back
into the water

hoping somehow that this half-eaten
cold and lifeless body might
magically come back to
life and swim away if only
they could get me back
into the water.

 

Holly Day's poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her newest poetry collections are Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), and The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press).