
Born in San Francisco and raised in Vacaville, Michelle Brittan Rosado earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, won the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize (Anhinga Press, 2016). Her poems have been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, San Francisco Chronicle’s “State Lines” column, and The New Yorker, as well as several anthologies.
Love After Dentistry
by Michelle Brittan Rosado
With my mouth half-numb against yours,
the palm on my face might as well touch
anyone’s. I can’t feel your thumb pulling down
my bottom lip, index resting
under the chin, even though it’s a habit made familiar
to me now. I have to rely on sight
to know what you’re doing, your eyes closed
against the memory of another woman
for all I know. Beyond us and the wall
of the room, the grass stretches towards the end
of the yard. I could call up the fingers
of someone else; I’ve done it
before. It was a kind of test, the recollection
of the last man like a layer
over your movements so that, for a second,
the two of you blurred. And I would
do the work of finding you—the pressure
of your arm behind my back, your hip
on the inner side of my thigh—just to separate
your touch from his, and in this way
I could choose you over and over. Maybe
you’ve done the same, there may have been times
my body changed under your body, it’s possible
you did not know who I was until I returned
to you as myself, and whatever light
the day had left would uncover our faces
to each other. But this time I turn my head, run
my tongue over the raw surfaces of my mouth
for the first time, while the fence outside
the window arranges itself in parallel
lines. Here are new spaces, the hard
plaster sanded over, my own teeth.