Divinations V: Pockets, Tooth Fairies, & the Surreal Real

“Sometimes you click the box shut, and sometimes you end with a question.”

Welcome back to our fifth episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone.

In this episode, I read my poem-in-progress, "Articles of Incorporation," inspired by Sandy's "Ecdysis Sonnet" from Episode 4: Shells, Learning to Listen, & the Lyric You, as well as by the Little Oracles lexical fragment “pocket.”

Articles of Incorporation
by Allison Arth | A work-in-progress poem

The teeth you use now were stuffed up in your head before
they descended, displacing the teeth you grew as a toddler,

the ones that fell out and made you a quarter,
your first ever capital. Turns out
it’s okay to sell yourself for profit, so long as it's mystic:
an economics of transubstantiation.

Once bought, I imagine teeth rove
all over: garbage cans,
your Dad’s dresser drawers, forgotten
pockets, the ocean.

Though sometimes you find them
thirty years later,
rattling around a blank plastic box,
and you wonder: were you to cast them

— you, diviner; you, divined —
what other life might you augur?

We talk about transubstantiation and the corporate body, secret sonnets and interrogative endings, randomized Dads, and more. Plus, Sandy shares an excerpt from her response poem to my featured reading — the last one she'll share in the miniseries, debuting in Episode 6, which drops December 12. Read along with the full transcript here.

xx, aa