The speaker of "Optical Mouth" opens with a confession that sounds almost practical: "i've burnt every memory onto dollar store / cd-rs." The choice of medium matters. A CD-R can be written only once, and a cheap one from a dollar store is the kind of disc that fades or fails to play. Right away the poem sets up a conflict between the wish to keep everything and the unreliability of the thing keeping it. Memory becomes data, and the speaker becomes its storage unit.
The poem then turns that archive into architecture. The discs form "walls like / snake skin into an upright coffin," a simile that joins two opposed ideas, shedding and burial. Snakeskin suggests something outgrown and left behind, yet here it hardens into a coffin standing on end, a space just big enough for one person. The second stanza supplies the interior view: "my face reflects on every side / blue and purple and doughnut-holed." Anyone who has tilted a disc under a lamp knows that oily blue-violet sheen. The phrase "doughnut-holed" is funny and unsettling at once, because each reflected face comes with a hole at its center. The speaker sees a self that is multiplied and also missing something, "staring back at every angle" with no way out of its own gaze.
The third stanza states the cost: "in here iam deprived of everything but / myself." The run-together "iam" (as it appears on the page) squeezes "I am" into a single cramped word, which fits the airless space. Then comes the poem's sharpest self-diagnosis. The speaker is "in love with false narratives / and dead dreams" that are "perfectly preserved but irrationally written." The word "written" keeps the disc metaphor going, since burning a disc is also called writing to it, while "irrationally" admits that the stories were never sound to begin with. Perfect preservation and falseness belong together here. A recording captures a version of events exactly, including its errors.
The fourth stanza turns violent, and its violence is the poem's strangest move. "to molt," the colon promises, as though an explanation follows: "i cut the corners of my mouth / and slide each disc in." The mouth is now a disc drive, and the speaker feeds the walls to themselves. The teeth, "top and bottom," scratch the discs as they go in, producing "lines / of mis-perception." The act of taking the memories back in damages them. The poem does not explain the cut, and the image is physically harsh, so it is safest to read it as a figure for painful self-consumption rather than to guess at a story behind it.
The two-line ending moves from the mouth to the gut, and the vocabulary becomes technical. The stomach is "sick with corrupted checksums," a checksum being the test that tells a computer whether data has arrived intact. Here the body fails that test. It waits "to / regurgitate lossy thoughts again tomorrow." "Lossy" belongs to compression, where each copy sheds a little detail, so the memories come back thinner each time. "Again tomorrow" is the final blow. Molting is supposed to end in renewal, but this one ends in a loop.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. Its stanzas shrink from three lines to four to three to two, as if the space were closing in. The lowercase, the light punctuation, and the enjambments that break phrases mid-thought ("like / snake skin," "waits to / regurgitate") give the voice a tired, murmured quality. Sound does some of the work that rhyme would, with the hard clustering of "sick with corrupted checksums" and the sibilance of "scratching lines."
What makes the poem significant is how fully it commits to its metaphor. It could have treated digital storage as a passing comparison. Instead it lets the metaphor govern the speaker's body, so that skin, mouth, and stomach all become hardware. It also captures a recognizably modern fear that keeping a record of a life is not the same as understanding it, and that replaying memory may wear it down.