Caitlin Grace McDonnell
The arc of the moral universe
is long, it detours occasionally
down alleyways where bodies
are commerce and water
hoarded. In Atlanta, my teeth
grit against one another at night,
like someone’s building something,
said the man in my bed, picturing
steel and mortar. The doctors
fit me for a guard to save my teeth.
Took three visits to the place
in the mall where I’d wait and
wait then sit while warm wax
embraced my pried open
mouth, dripped down
my throat. When I went
to pick it up, the receptionist
said your insurance
won’t pay. It will be $300.
I don’t have that, I said, and she
took the carefully molded
map that matched only my
mouth and tossed it in the trash.
The arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends. Like wax
to teeth, like a line of people
around a city block,
it bends.
Caitlin Grace McDonnell is the author of Dreaming the Tree (Belladonna Books, 2003) and Looking for Small Animals (Nauset Press 2012). Her poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Salon, Washington Square, Chronogram among others. As a high school student in Boulder she took classes at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later moving to New York where she attended Bard College and studied with John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach. Caitlin won a grant to study at the Poet’s House in Ireland and was a New York Times Poetry Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She is an English teacher in Brooklyn where she lives with her eight-year-old daughter.
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