American Currency

I spent Friday watching the dentist carve 
history from my teeth. Two decades 
of poor man's fillings, silver-stuffed 
childhood cavities. The latex gloves squeaking,
the fluorescents bearing down
like a strange heaven. 

Now with my adult money, I swap
cracked filler for composite,
and a paycheck dissolves like sugar 
in my mouth.

Through the window, a child counts change
for the meter, each coin a small silver
moon in their palm.

I think of prison, how my father
measured time in twenty-cent hours, 
how many toothbrushes that would buy, 
how many stamps to write home. 

Some nights, I dream our bodies are 
parking meters, feeding coins 
into ourselves just to exist.

My father, just released, lands a forklift job. 
His world weighed in pallets and paychecks.
He texts me photos of sparrows nesting

in the warehouse rafters, their wings 
grazing steel. Look how ordinary 
freedom can be, watch how even birds 
find ways to nest in the bones of machinery.

I rest my mouth until the numbness wears.
I slide my tongue across this smooth new surface.
All that money spent trying to erase what
marked us, what poverty wrote in teeth.

And yet, each morning, I wake to find
dark silver blooming beneath enamel,
my tongue counting quarters 
that tastes like inheritance.