“Ode to Being Born with Teeth and Sharpening Them Every Day,” by Barbara Hamby

If you like surprises, being born has to be the best, one minute swimming in nothing, and the nextpopping out into a hot late July day in New Orleans like a gumbo of sweat and bad news,because the war is over and your father has come home, but others are lining up, ready to take his placein the murderer’s row, rat-a-tat-tat and all that, the blood that spills like ketchup from a broken bottle in landsso far away they seem like a dream or a book written by a mystic with time on his hands, and that’s allyou had then, acres of time, your teeth biting off each day like a piece of rough bread and chewing it—learning to eat, speak, walk, everything you needed to take on the days ahead, and going to school,you had to sharpen your teeth for that, like the time in the third grade when some mean gir