Phyllis Klein

Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poetry therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently The Bloom, Comstock Review, Mad Swirl, Live Encounters, and The New Verse News. She has won several finalist awards, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her book, The Full Moon Herald was 2021 finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She hosts Poets in Conversation, a Zoom reading series started during the Pandemic.

Relentless

When my mother was alive, she visited me
from New York for two weeks. After she left, my mouth
refused to open. I took my jaw for granted before that.
And later, all the mistaken mouthguards didn’t help, the dentists
with their theories, wrong as my mother’s determination to break
the bone of my spirit, to prove she was right after all.

Last night, alive with aching, I listened to hypnosis for TMJ
with an Australian named Michael telling me my tongue can help
my jaw learn how to relax. That my jaw is just as soft as a wet
piece of string instead of a hydraulic jackhammer.
Michael made me cry with his whispered exultations about
how I now move and breathe like a new person, but I wonder

how I could be anyone but myself, one who loves to gnaw.
You only get one mandible, one maxilla, and mine feel
as if they will die tomorrow. They hurt with the ferocity
of a jaw of life on a mission to pull me from the wreck
of my crumpled face, a sheet of metal damaged with age and sun.
This grinding relentless. Each torque, a memory, a haunting—

and a drive to forget. All night, eating my way through
whatever obstacles I’ve crashed into now and before.
All those eighteen childhood years molded into muscles
and bones chained up like whimpering dogs pleading for release.