my teeth

( which a few of you have kindly commented on) remind me of those movie sets for old westerns. From the street side it looks as tho its a string of fully functioning groovy little businesses but if ya head around back you'll see the store fronts are just a facade..propped up by sticks.
I've had 6 teeth pulled, a couple crowned and almost every one is filled with metal or plastic.

class and teeth....they're deeeply entwined.

My single struggling mom managed to finance braces for me right when i was colliding with puberty. It truly was hell.....most of my teeth were sideways or overlapped as i " had too many". So they got rid of a few then for a while i wore this contraption in the roof of my mouth...every night before i supposedly slept my mom would insert a key into this contraption and when she turned the key the 2 halves of the device would push outward in an attempt to make my upper jaw wider. This hurt like living hell. So i'd go to bed in pain and wake up with a dull ache which subsided slowly throughout the day until bedtime came round and she'd do it again. I used to cry and beg her not to turn the key.
She thought it was all for my own good and survival in the world as a girl. That "prettiness" would save my ass....along with talent. I was in beauty pageants, dance recitals, modeling school....learning to walk a t-ramp at 13 yrs old.
To her, these were the survivals skills i needed....college was never the plan. That just wasnt where girls like me ended up.
and in some ways she was right.....kinda.
but i can't shake the thought that i don't have my own face....it was reshaped by the minions of patriarchy.
So after all that face re-shaping i then became bulemic in my teen quest for poor girl survival which ofcourse slowly rotted all those newly aligned teeth. My molars took the brunt of it...
which brings me to to the old western movie set analogy.

I have dreams to this day of trying to free my mouth of metal wires that are woven throughout my teeth...knowing that if i succeed, my teeth may just crumble, sometimes pieces begin to fall into my hands....but i don't care...i want to be free.