Thom Schramm

Teeth

Call it truth when teeth

fall from your mouth.

Each bony proof

you worry out.

Cut in the gum, quick

tug from the root,

sweet blood on the tongue—

there goes youth.

Thom Schramm is the author of The Leaf Blower (Blue Cubicle Press) and editor of Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Eastern Washington University Press). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, and Smartish Pace.