"Mid-Life with Teeth" by Linda Dove

Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet of four books: In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in the hills just east of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.

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Mid-Life with Teeth


What if you don’t jump the shark, you just swim up to it 
and touch its body with one of your fingers. Its toothsome grin 
wrapped in the skin of silvered shingles, after storm after storm 
roughs them. Gills like shuttered windows. The whole machine
turning on you, a house in a hurricane-force wind, time
you thought you could weather. You want to do something 
besides just starting over, over and over again. You want the arrow,
which resembles a tooth in the mouth of this imaginary shark, 
to hit home and stick, sprung taught from your fingers. 
You want to stop throwing away body parts. You imagine
your discarded breasts, floating on the tide like a bottle.
Inside is a message that something is trying to end you.
It is small and hungry. You hurl all this flotsam back 
to the surf as far as you can. They are bait for the shark.
They will bring it closer. What’s left are two scars--
mouths, straightlined and unamused—running over
your heart. You will fill the scars with color, with ferns
and starlight and wings, like repaired cracks. You reach for
a word—kintsugi—to describe your body as a bowl,
the gilt-filled breaks. This is the life of an object.
The shark, of course, is an empire of greed.