I'm Adelimo, and this is the slowdown.

Once I was with my friends in Cape Cod and slipped on ice and shipped my front tooth.

I had to fly all the way back home to Kentucky with a busted lip and a shattered tooth.

I was lucky enough to have a good dentist who came in on a Sunday and removed the shards

that were stuck in my gums and got me on the road to recovery.

But tooth stuff haunts me. I hate it. What is it about the mouth that feels so personal?

I am impeccable with my tooth care, my flossing, my avoidance of sugar, and still I had to have a

tooth pulled last year. Why? Because even with a bite guard worn diligently each night,

I am apparently trying to grind my teeth to dust while I sleep.

I have finally learned not to cry at the dentists. They are good folks.

But my teeth do feel particularly precarious. I want my teeth to all be okay.

I want them to remain in my skull so one might recognize me in a stack of other

skulls if I were to say end up in the catacombs. In today's truthful poem,

we see how the importance of teeth and the emotions attached to them

cannot only be individual but inherited.

Father Teeth by Ashley Brook Daily

I flick the tooth with my tip tongue and it knocks against its neighbors, a sound like the crack

of a knuckle and the tooth, groan, nickel-sized, falls into my palm. Every one of the airport

has somewhere to be as my smile shakes loose. Is it a dream? I don't always know myself.

Sometimes I choke on old bubblegum webbed between my teeth, or sometimes my mouth is a machine

bent on destroying itself. Tectonic teeth collide, splinter, bruises and bone dust cover my wet

bottom lip. The dictionary of dreams tells me, you may dream of tooth loss if you feel powerless

...