Tooth Abstraction

By Kirby Olson (April 2018)

The Dentist is In, Anthony Falbo

 

 

ears back I thought to escape Endodontic Associates

and went instead to cheaper Thomas Hebert of Utica,

who performed a root canal for half price on French Road

at some point in the year 2002. He listened

to cool jazz as he dug down into the tooth.

 

He took smoking breaks. On his wall

was a framed Siberian tiger, whose tooth

he had treated at the Utica Zoo in 1987.

In 2015, the root canal failed. My cheek

blew up like a pee-wee football. Dr.

 

Hebert had passed on at age 65. I

drove to Utica and got Dr. Walker

at Endodontic Associates, and paid the full

price: $1500. He went in and fixed it,

and I was in good hands but not in Utica.

 

I was across a river in New Hartford.

After the third visit I drove down to the Munson

chessplayers before tiny obscure birds in the lower left.

 

I visited the Utica Library where an older

drunken couple were yelling on the steps

of the neo-classical façade across from the

He had glasses and rudimentary decency—

 

a London Fog coat, and pants, and leather shoes.

He was a darker person—maybe Croatian or Serbian.

She was blonde but had seen hard

 

The man pleaded, as she walked away.

turned away, as they went different ways.

 

He lingered longingly on her retreating form.

I then went into a Ukrainian Catholic

Church house and bought a dozen pierogis

for 6 dollars. I asked the old woman

We laughed at the inverted letters.

I drove through the ruins of Utica,

Sutra, and did actually weep in a parking lot

before a Barnes and Noble once I got back to

New Hartford and bought Art of the Deal,

wondering if Trump could help East Utica with its

vanished glory and its surviving residents

 

trying to hold on to what was left

while around the neighborhood young

men stalked with pants down around their

—

of which East Utica was their alternative.

 

 

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More by Kirby Olson here.

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