Diastema

Brushed my teeth
to a low beam gleam. Smiled

in the mirror and thought about
the gap between my top front teeth that closed

on its own by the time I was 13.
Was feeling myself until I thought about

my mother’s shy smile
as she told me about going to the Bahamas

and the men who thought her
a sexy beauty because of hers.

She is 80, looks 60,
always has money.

I can only pray
for her kind of luck.

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Carla M. Cherry is an English teacher and poet. She has been published in Anderbo, For Harriet, Obscura, Dissident Voice, Random Sample Review, Eunoia Review, MemoryHouse Magazine, Down In The Dirt, In Between Hangovers, Picaroon Poetry, Firefly Magazine, Ariel Chart and Synaeresis. She has published four books of poetry with Wasteland Press: Gnat Feathers and Butterfly Wings, Thirty Dollars and a Bowl of Soup, Honeysuckle Me, and These Pearls Are Real.

I have spent a lifetime unlearning American ideals of beauty, and my poem “Diastema” is yet another challenge to that construct.