Primary incisors D, E, F, G

They found four baby teeth buried deep in my mother’s breast when I was eight. Not mine. She says as much as that sounds like something my teeth would do, she would remember me leaving them behind, would have noticed them traveling through the adipose tissue, rupturing ducts, and then lodging in the lobules. She says when I was a baby, I would have been happy to bite a big hole in her, I would have followed my teeth back in.

Permanent incisors 24, 25, interproximal dermoid cyst

On a tablet, my doctor circles a white-gray blotch. A cyst lives on the floor of my mouth, smooth to the tongue, but unignorable. She says with this kind of cyst there could be hair or teeth in there. It looks like the skull of a small animal, and I imagine the filmy outer sac yielding under a scalpel, dark hair pushing out from a mouth of miniscule bloody teeth.

Primary anterior teeth

I was born with a full set of baby teeth; my mother says for twenty-three months I chewed her nipples raw, and the round, cotton pads meant to absorb leaking milk turned red in her bra and stained pink in the wash. She says when I would unlatch it looked like I had been drinking her blood, but I wouldn’t tolerate a bottle, or a pacifier, only her poor, abused skin.

Primary first molars B, I, L, S

My mother has four small puckers on her breast from where the found teeth were extracted. She wanted to keep them after they were removed, to compare them to mine, which now live in a jar in a box in a closet in her attic. She was allowed to look at them in a plastic biohazard bag, but she couldn’t take them home. Later, she said she didn’t mind leaving them; they looked like any other teeth, but they didn’t feel like mine, they didn’t have my energy. I asked her what energy my teeth had and she said they were sharper and hungrier than other teeth.

Primary canines C, H

I was six when my adult teeth erupted over my baby teeth, so I briefly had two rows like a lamprey. I started losing my baby teeth three or four at a time after that, but the top canines were stubborn and had to be yanked out. I took them home in a small, paper envelope. I didn’t exchange them for tooth fairy quarters, instead I wrapped bread ties around them and told my mother they were earrings.

Permanent dentition 1 - 32

I had a long biting phase, all through elementary school. I couldn’t resist the urge to gnaw beaver-like on pencils and markers, wooden blocks, Lego pieces, backpack straps. Sometimes I tried to see how many pages of a book I could bite through at once, but none of it compared to sinking my teeth into someone’s finger. I would sneak up on my mother and bite her shoulder, her forearm. I sometimes still bite the meatiest part of my own hand, wishing it were a salty neck, wishing it were a flexed bicep. A breast.

Permanent canines 6, 11, 22, 27

During surgery, they remove the cyst and in it find four canine teeth, slick and bloody, birthed by a scalpel, and untangled from a nest of hair. The surgeon shows me a picture; they look strong and smooth. I wish I could put them on a necklace for my mother, I think they would match the earrings. My own teeth feel empty, itchy. My mother says the anesthesia has made a balloon of me and puts my hand on her wrist, so I don’t float away, but I take her wrist in my teeth and grind down to feel the flex of her tendons, the give of her muscle; I try not to break the skin.

Primary dentition A - T

My mother says when she was weaning me, I tried to fit her whole breast in my mouth, that I was growling like a dog, that she was afraid to let me nurse again after that, she said it was as if I was trying to eat her. She said she loves that we’ve always been close, but back then she thought I’d swallow her whole.