Dental insurance is important, I tell myself.
Just last night there was a man. He stood in a parking-lot
with his arms full of divinity—

Ben and Jerry’s. His teeth were a little ruined
from telling the future and knowing god,
etc. He was black

and my Dixie grandmother told me once
that when they get a little money,
what they do is buy gold.

All our cooks had gold teeth,
she said. I want to tell her how I found myself
outside a 7-11

after midnight, hands frozen
to two pints of ice cream. Him saying
The freezer’s broken. Help yourself, take it all.

*

Rosalie Moffett is the winner of a 2012 Discovery / Boston Review poetry prize. Her work has appeared in The Believer, FIELD, Tin House, AGNI and the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. She recently received her MFA from Purdue University and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.