My canine is my great-great-grandmother’s.
Yellowed with age,
a well-read page.
The sediment
is fossilised with fables.
When I am lost,
I trace it with my tongue-tip
and soak up the Braille.
The burial mound of my wisdom tooth
is my ancestral aunt’s,
sleeping snug
like the lump of Australian opal
she left me.
A treasure, a milky thing.
A stone breast
resting in the gum
of the scarlet cloak
we keep in the airing cupboard.
My sunflower seed buck-tooth
is from the farm girl
that would germinate into
some flying bird part of me.
It is strong and broad
and the first thing you see,
a placard:
This girl is of the earth.
My third incisor is Victorian.
It tastes of elderflower cordial
and sepia photographs,
and reminds me
that even when I stand still,
stay silent,
time blurs past.
The altar of my molar,
nobody knows who that came from.
I think it is soft enough
to have been swept up
from the ashes
of witch-fire.
I can taste the scream of it,
and maybe that’s why
my lips have such a temper.
Ellora Sutton is a British writer (and museum gift shop worker) who has recently graduated with a first in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University for the Creative Arts. Her obsessions include poetry and Jane Austen.