poem without teeth
by Marlin M. Jenkins
my body finds new things
to fall out in my dreams. fingers.
intestines. fruit. hair follicles.
rusted coins. then the bones.
they clench against themselves
in a heap. they chatter all night.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and is the author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020). A graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA in poetry, his work has found homes with Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Iowa Review, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “poem without teeth”? This poem is from a series currently titled without. It started as an experiment in description of words/ideas without directly stating them: How can the poem evoke the image of a tree without ever saying “tree”? Evoke prayer without the word prayer? What weird directions and associations might develop from writing around an idea without naming it in the body of the poem? Mostly it was just a series of practice experiments, but they started to develop into poems I really liked and wanted to do more with. After they began to accumulate, they started to lean toward absence not just as a premise but a theme, and, as I tried to let them be driven by associative logic, they increasingly reached toward a sense of haunted longing.
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