By Theresa Burns

There is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.
   —Edgar Allen Poe 

I heard this the first time from my high school boyfriend, 
who became my college boyfriend when he hitchhiked 

from Long Island to Boston a week after I’d left, 
found me in Mary Ann’s on Comm Ave with friends I was 

 starting to make. And I was both happy and annoyed 
Paul had come, and the next morning he said it— 

I’d cut my classes to lie with him on the quad, 
infatuated with his blue-jean eyes, his Martin guitar, 

and he told me the gap in my front teeth, though strange, 
had an element of beauty. And I believed him then.      

It was the Eighties—Lauren Hutten was hot, and Les Blank 
made a movie about the mystique of gap-toothed women, 

and every guy I dated since would mention that movie, 
remark on that gap, which made me more self-conscious, 

but if I threatened to have it fixed, they’d say don’t. 
We adored Patti Smith then, with her heroin-thin arms, 

and the old man voice of Neil Young, more alley cat 
than honey, and I began to see what Paul understood, 

that in every kind of beauty, there is a strangeness,  
a mistake. Years later, a friend told me, 

Paul became a junkie, and died of a blood clot 
that mostly junkies got.     I thought of him last week— 

the man behind wanted me to make a right on red, 
except there was traffic coming, and he got out of his car                    

to yell at me directly, swearing and spitting, my kids 
in the back seat. And then he said it— 

Why don’t you get your ugly teeth fixed, lady? 

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Theresa Burns is the author of the poetry collections Design (Terrapin Books, 2022) and Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, JAMA, Plume, and elsewhere. A former book editor and winner of the 2023 New Jersey Poet’s Prize, Burns is the founder of the community reading series Watershed Literary Events and teaches writing in and around New York.