On Group Therapy

My lover wakes me in her mother tongue,
presses her thumbs to my lips until I’m no longer a mouth
with holes in my gums where teeth should be.
When it’s time to leave, she does not come with me to the hospital,
but she rises with me anyway, wearing her honeybee overalls
and going out to the garden.
When I depart, I imagine all of us grieving people
shoving alternate versions of ourselves from
the backseats of our moving cars, the crunch of gravel
between their teeth echoing in our ears
while their tongues leave skid marks of saliva along the highway.
The parts of us that survive reach the hospital, and we gather in a circle.
We take turns convincing ourselves every violence was – is – necessary,
that even Jesus whipped,
even Jesus flipped tables.
I once kept a pill bottle full of my baby teeth on my nightstand.
My cousin shook the bottle until the teeth
split in two.
In dreams my teeth fall out of my head
and my double gathers them up,
shaking them in its hands until each one splits in two
and it returns them halved to my head.
We sit in a halved circle, now, while the psychologist tells us
it’s normal to have dreams about swallowing your teeth
but asks me twice if I still see my other holding tooth halves across the room.
I say no, and run my tongue over my teeth to count them one by one,
then again one by one,
until I’m certain nobody’s stolen them, and nobody’s coming to rattle my skull
to make me swallow my teeth
my lover’s word for teeth is zähne.
When I get home, she has buried my baby teeth in our front garden
and tells me I can find them again in the mouths of the snapdragons.

Grace Phillips is a poet and MFA student from Indianapolis, Indiana. Some of Grace's favorite writers include Billie Tadros, Ilya Kaminsky, and Laura Kasischke. More of Grace's published work can be found at gracewritesbooks.com.