Diastema
In my mouth, my two center teeth hang forever estranged
Dying to meet one another
(But it will never happen because
The time it will take my two teeth
To meet is infinite)
This is the lapse in between my teeth
It is called a diastema
One possible cause says that it can result
When a person’s teeth are too small for their
Jaw bone
Some say this is genetic
As in my grandmother didn’t want to be confined
In the slightest
She has one a bit thicker than mine
My mother had one
Slightly larger than both the spaces between
My grandma’s and mine combined
Like my mom, her lapse was the real rebellious kind
But for health reasons, she closed it with braces
Yet still I hold this legacy in my mouth
My gap is remembrance
A muscle memory of sorts
A spatial reminder that I carry my grandma and mom in me always
No matter the distance
My gap is diasporic
Complicated and separate
Yet still so connected despite the immense space and time in between
The teeth on either side of my gap look at each other and say “I feel
like I’ve known you my whole life”
It took me an intermittent series of seventeen years
To smile with my mouth opened
If you looked, you could find countless photos of my lips
Pressed together, attempting to smile, holding back a secret
The secret? That I was too insecure
And uncomfortable to hold space for myself
So instead I suppressed my teeth behind my lips
In hopes that I would appear good-looking
In turn the suppression only made me look
More uncomfortable within myself
My gap does the thing that makes me nervous
She brings attention to me
Any sliver of laughter and there she is
Front row and center
Chuckling at anything she can make out
From silly puns to clever roasts
I can’t hide her no matter how hard I try
I speak and she gives me away
I say words that end in a -th
And the force of the -th starts on the inside of my mouth
And ends up pushing air through her
Tickling her body playfully on the way out
Sometimes, as in all the time
I stick my tongue in between her just because I can I drink
liquids and suck sharply to fill her if only for a second This
lets her know I have not forgotten about her I call this
apology
Forgive me hollow gap
For my shallowness
I kept my mouth shut
Leaving you lonely and trapped in the dark
With no room to be yourself
It did not make sense to me how
Something so small could have made herself so immense and vast
How something so narrow could have made herself so open
Hollow gap, you are willing entryway
In the cave of my mouth
You are perpetually delayed lapse in time
You welcome the pushing and exiting that happen through you
You put me to shame
Continuously
Boundless lapse, you understand what it means to be vulnerable
And to know that eventually everything will come and go If you
give it the space to
Stephanie Dinsae is a poet and Black Classicist from the Bronx. She is a 2019 Smith College graduate and has received an MFA degree in Poetry with a Joint Concentration in Literary Translation from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Stephanie often writes poetry about shame, Greco-Roman myth as it relates to Blackness and her own life, video games, and the flexibility/fallibility of memory.
Artist Statement:
I am fascinated by shame and the ways it transforms into pride and confidence, if you give it a chance to.
I inherited a lot of shame through my differences — feeling as if I were unwanted because of my skin color or my hair texture or the gap in my mouth. “Diastema” is a love letter, an apology to my heritage, an apology to my deliberate features that make me who I am. I write to a younger self, who would be floored
by how far we have come in our confidence and acceptance. At the time of writing this piece, I had yet to meet my
grandmother in person. After having met her, however, I know that even with all the distance, I can just look in the
mirror, smile widely, and watch her appear. Writing about my gap reminded me that I am so deeply tied
to a lineage of women with unmatched passion and beautiful, bright grins.