ten thousand tiny spots
By Sheila Armstrong.
In the city, there are ten thousand thousand mouths. But a mouth is a terrible thing. A gash across the skin; a slit that has been widened and then healed so that two lumps of scar tissue trace the wound on either side. And inside, inside some instinct has caused lumps of calcium and carbon and bone to protrude out, sprouting in some awful facsimile of symmetry; each lump pointing upward, anchored with a cruel hook below the jaw, their surfaces blunted and ground down into flat planes that crush and grind.