If My Dentist Could Probe Deep Enough

There’d be the house I swallowed— the confetti-speckled linoleum and zig-zag stairs, cork coasters and swizzle sticks, cocktail glasses shaped like crystal balls. Farther down, a sagging armchair, the dusty yellow cat, and tangled around my rusty liver, a clatter of window blinds. Then, with steel tweezers, my dentist will pull the smoldering tip of a chimney, smoke rising from ashtrays heavy as meteorites. Although anesthetized, I’m awake enough to hear crickets chink like falling ice, the ping of rooms dropping one by one into an aluminum bowl. There go the hissing gas stove, the two-pronged fork, the turkey collapsing from its bones. Who would have thought a family meal could cause so much pain?  Behind a paper mask, the dentist asks “Better now?” and I’m all babble and tears, my tongue groping for roots.