D N MI E TH S P A G
by angbeen saleem
e venu A h t f Fi
e venu A h t Six
treet
S 45th
this is where I lost a tooth four years ago after I worked up the courage to ask my dentist for it after an extraction
Dear teeth, Happy Valentine’s Day! I’ve loved you for so long. I know in the beginning we didn’t get along. I told my mom I needed braces, the dentist assured her I didn’t. I hope you’ll forgive me. Who knew that twenty years later, the dentist would tell me that I actually did need braces? And that I would be upset by it? Enough to be brought to almost tears at every orthodontist visit? I promise that me changing you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I promise that it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you could stay the way you are forever. I promise I told the orthodontist to mind the gaps, to try to keep you as you are, as much as possible. She assured me that some of you were too deformed to bridge the gaps even if she wanted to. I promise this changes nothing between us. Love always, angbeen
WHY DO MY TEETH MATTER
I’ve attached a lot of self-worth to my teeth because they make me different. Being a kind of fat (unclear whether I count as a small fat or not) makes me different. Being different is what I’ve always thought of as my strength. What happens if that goes away? I’m scared people will like me for being like everyone else. Why don’t I want to be like everyone else? Why don’t I want to be liked? Why do I take pride in not being liked? Why do I resent not being liked the way other people are liked? Why do I get teary eyed at the orthodontist’s office? What will I do to stay the same? To stay unmarriageable. If you’re unmarriageable, the only person who will marry you is the one who wants to. How did marriage get here? Yes, I know straighter teeth won’t make me automatically marriageable. My mother has been talking about my marriage since I was 16. I’m a 32 year old Pakistani woman who prays only when I’m laying in bed or walking down East 7th street. My mother has muted the rishta WhatsApp groups. I’ve never made a roti by myself. My chai is good. This is not a biodata. Everything I do is a love letter to every person I’ve ever met. Life is change yet I’m so afraid of it. My teeth are the solid ground I stand on. When you see my mother’s side of the family you’ll understand. Is this self-erasure? Colonialism? Pema Chödrön says there is no solid ground. Fuck Pema Chödrön. What does she know about my fucking teeth.
NOTES ON MY WAY TO GET INVISALIGN i need to explain myself— this is for a medical reason not because i wanted to. “plan on a new smile” the ad in front of me says. what if i’m lying? what if i do want to be fixed. what if there is something fixable about me. i guess that’s the fear always. i’m thinking about how on the internet, youtubers who don’t intend to get plastic surgery, go to plastic surgeons to see what the plastic surgeon would fix if anything. it’s like a test. am i fixable: yes no the answer is always yes. the youtubers are often slightly offended but also sometimes excited to hear that. i guess to know that we are fixable is to feel that maybe our suffering is endable. that the problem is us and not the world. it feels very capitalist. for us to be the problem. for us to all fit into the same cog, be interchangeable. straight teeth, skinny, symmetrical faces and bodies, i mean people should do whatever they like with their bodies but i can’t not see the greater context of the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy we see our bodies through.
finally, a tooth on paper
finally, a tooth on paper flesh warms me, wraps me in its succulent floss, embraces my tentacled crevasses i flatten. i bleed. i draw blood from the ones i want to know me.
after Georgia O’Keeffe
GOODBYE SNACKS GOODBYE GOODBYE SNACKS SNACKS Goodbye midday popcorn. Hello spending way too long in the bathroom to brush, floss and mouth wash but everyone thinks I’m pooping which I might be also. Goodbye whole apples, my teeth are too sensitive for you now. Goodbye eating dinner at the fancy movie theaters, I never liked Goodbye airport pita chips. you anyways. Goodbye walking back from the pharmacy twix. Goodbye mid-drive beef jerky, fountain sodas and Funyuns. Goodbye chocolate sandwich bar I pretend is a breakfast—it’s made of Goodbye sticky steering wheel. ancient Greek grains! Goodbye everything croissant I eat on my walk back from Goodbye caramels, toffees and creme brulees. Windsor Terrace. Hello sticking my hands into my mouth at the table during a pandemic in front Goodbye walking chai lattes. of strangers. Hello money I will save from not getting snacks at any cafe I pass as Hello brushing my teeth in the car and spitting mouthwash into planters. a treat for leaving the house or being alive? Or both. Goodbye shame. Goodbye money I spent on getting these damn aligners. Goodbye sitting at the table and grazing the teaspoon of queso left with the Goodbye grandma in my gaps. tiny tortilla chip shards for hours. Goodbye cross bite. (I still don’t know you.) Hello calculated and timed encounters with food. Goodbye snacks. Goodbye saying I have fucked up teeth in my Tinder bio.
The orthodontist told me I had to commit to Invisalign today or I wouldn’t get the $500 discount. Teeth are not bones. Bones can heal. Teeth can’t smile for the pictures. Teeth can’t overrate what’s understood. Teeth don’t care about conformity. At least mine never have. Conformity, who me? Never. Yes. Maybe. Always. A Tinder man tells me “Your teeth aren’t fucked up, I love them.” We can love fucked up things. We are gnarled, full of yeses. Here now. Here how? Here now. Not always. We thought we had time.
reflections from a molar
i remain here for decades, crushing the dead and undead. i am the stones on a beach of an ocean that does not long to know me. how do you long for a thing so rarely seen? i envy shark teeth, their sharpness, the way they fall out when they have outlived their use. i wonder if it’s better to be useless than to prevail in darkness. i wonder what it would be like to hang around a man’s throat, bouncing against his chest, close to the thump of his heart. At a bar near the beach, a woman will bring her fingers to his neck and my severe edges, tempted to make herself bleed. the sun will remain with me for decades.
ODE TO MINDIN listless i am when this wary canyon, slick with spit, hoards a lie made of mountains that waits to be rebuked or opened into a field i am a child (always) searching for the family i will to be mine and never lost this keeping of the record books the names i do not know i’ve stuffed my smile
G THE GAPS with history perfumed it with mint from my mother’s garden tongues will trace my cavern of a mouth i warn, i keep my distance, i make space, in my skyline for the love i’ve never accepted regale me, loving arch, lush with honey, into an embrace.
MIND THE GAPS an orthodontia-inspired zine by Angbeen Saleem
If you enjoyed this zine, and you’d like to buy me a twix (one i’ll eat at home and not on a walk): Venmo - @angbeen Cashapp - $angbeen Follow me on IG: @angribeen