So this is interesting too, because this other thing,
the thing that I have really been working on,
at least the last this week, I guess.
Maybe see, that's why I was like,
this is what made me think I would do a Q and A,
but now I don't think I want to do a Q and A.
[LAUGHTER]
Because I almost like--
so because I'm working it out.
As I said, this is the newest thing.
And it's like anyway, we'll see.
We'll talk about it.
How about that?
You can ask me about it maybe, and I'll be like,
I don't know what you're talking about.
OK.
I had said to the kids, who maybe are here,
some of the best moments for me is just really
just keeping record.
I was like that's what Frank O'Hara showed us.
You could just have lunch and you can have a whole career.
Lunch poems.
So that idea of just sometimes you catch a thing in a poem
and it's like almost completely contained.
The only thing that's different is that we were actually
hearing this story in a pizza parlor,
but I was like, I'm going to set a party.
It's almost like what you were talking about with the Dustin
Hoffman inside of the thing inside that was very cool,
that thing you were doing.
So I was like, I'm going to put it in a party about a party
or something.
So otherwise, everything else is true.
So the person who's telling this, the storyteller
is telling us about having seen the picture.
So I didn't ever see the picture,
but I heard about the picture.
So anyway, as I say, who knows?
I might get halfway through it and be like,
God damn it, I need to make these poems shorter.
But let's see how this one goes.
This is all I really wanted to read today.
The Woman Wearing Human Teeth Earrings.
In a photograph taken of the party at the party,
the woman wearing human teeth earrings
smiles with a black hole where her mouth is half open,
as if in the middle of a laugh or an explanation.
The woman at her shoulder will bite
into something, an olive pit or baby carrot,
somehow chipping a front tooth before the party ends.
The person closest to her will stumble, as if
over the foot of a ghost descending stairs,
losing several tipsy teeth and several gauzy hours in the ER
later that night.
Teeth are exposed by everyone, except those
who smile without showing teeth in the photograph,
but we hardly notice given the woman wearing teeth purchased
in a part of New Orleans far from the fake witch doctors
and fortune tellers of Bourbon Street.
No one remembered what the woman said of who sold her the teeth.
One is always interrupted telling stories at a party.
You suggested they could have come
from a mother who kept her child's teeth like diamonds.
But I said, these were adult teeth--
as if an adult could not have a mother
still moonlighting as a tooth fairy.
We were at our last party.
Did the teeth hang like stalactites, apples or fangs?
asked someone who had not seen the photograph
on the storyteller's phone.
A husky, sweaty bar singer some claimed
was Etta James was said to have worn giant molar
earrings the night she sang all her old ballads,
but never more bewitchingly, before vanishing.
The photograph of the party was taken
on the phone of the host near the end of the night.
Several party attendees experienced
terrible, unprecedented cavities.
OK, I'm making all this up.
I'm sorry.
I'm like, everything is true.
This is my going.
I'm making this up now.
Yeah, where was I?
The photograph of the party was taken
on the phone of the host near the end of the night.
Several party attendees experienced
terrible, unprecedented cavities.
The person who danced with the woman whispering into her ear
lost three bottom teeth in a glass of cold milk
the next morning.
The rim of the glass was bleeding.
For many of us, teeth appear in the mouth
as if the bones of the skull broke free of the body to speak.
For most of us, the mouth voices whatever takes
shape in the heart or brain.
But for some at the party, the mouth
was empty as a newborn's, except grain stained the breath,
the tongue was lonely.
Of course, the first to start contacting people
after the party was the woman who'd worn the teeth earrings.
She essentially wanted to know how to discard the things.
She couldn't speak.
Her text claimed she woke with no teeth after a terrible dream,
but she sent no pictures as proof.
She dreamed of exes who believed wearing
the wisdom teeth of your enemy bestowed the wearer with wisdom.
The scent of regret remained on their fingers
after setting the teeth in gold or silver, their hands waving
off ghosts disguised as horseflies.
What happened to the rest of the party?
The storyteller got a drink or a toothache.
And you told me there was an island
of widows who wear the jawbones of their dead as jewelry.
And I asked where?
How?
[APPLAUSE]