What It Means To Be Living

Poetry by ​​Samantha Samakande

The dentist stabs 
an x-ray full of my teeth. 
 
I interrogate his beefy fingers until 
my eyes are dim and I can’t 
 
bear to nod or perform 
the appropriate amount of murmuring 
 
to what he is saying anymore. 
His judgment is irritating.
 
I understand dead 
from the half-chewed words 
 
that only slightly dribble out 
onto his lips and dry out. He clinks
 
a spoon on my tooth,
the big, milky one that was my favorite, 
 
says it’s off-colored, 
says it’s been dead
 
to the nerve for years, asks if I want it            
extracted. 
 
I sit in his contraption 
of a chair in the middle of my mind, 
 
thinking about what it means 
to be living and what it means to be dead 
 
to the nerve. How much of me 
is machine, is function, is the casual 
 
decay that is being body 
and is this the nerve of me, 
 
or is the nerve of me 
the part that is already over?

Samantha Samakande​​

Samantha Samakande is a Zimbabwean poet currently based out of Bloomfield, NJ where she resides with her husband. She is a graduate of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and is a junior editor for F(r)iction. It is her lived experience as an immigrant that made her a poet, an observer, and a daughter of many tongues and in-betweens. Her work has appeared in Pif Magazine and Hobart. In 2020, she was the second-place winner of Frontier Poetry’s Award for New Poets.