Oral surgery villanelle

Note: teeth aren't bones. But I wanted that rhyme to work, darn it! It was difficult enough to backwards-engineer this whole poem (*sobs quietly*). Of all the forms I've tried, this was the hardest.

I took a picture of this while my periodontist was getting something from another room. I love anatomical models!

Nelly Bryce

over at Poetry Pals recently shared the following prompt about villanelles:

“For those of us who haven’t [written one before], the villanelle form is (apparently) a French verse that traditionally contains three-line stanzas before a final quatrain, ending on a powerful last line in the final stanza.

“This piece from The Poetry Place (Write Better Poems), has a good explanation of what a villanelle is and how to write one. I also liked this suggestion at the bottom for getting started:

First, find a topic. If you don’t already have this, here are two possibilities:
—Something that recurs or has recurred in your life. This could be a situation, a thought or feeling, a life event (birth, love, death), or maybe a physical object.
—A subject that can be looked at from multiple angles or through different examples (like the way Bishop explores different kinds of loss in “One Art”).”

---

It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before:
sometimes flossing fails, sometimes genes secede
so I open my mouth and get sewn at the core.

The drugs send me sleeping, slow waves on the shore
then I swim to the surface, lips wrapped in seaweed
(it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before).

My body a battle, pink gums waging war
and teeth say We’re bones, but we scatter like seeds
so I open my mouth and get sewn at the core.

It’s partly just Age shoving Youth to the floor
then kicking her breathless till she starts to bleed—
it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before.

The tissue from people who need it no more:
a bit of their life to slake my gum's greed
(I open my mouth and get sewn at the core).

When younger, malaise was easier to ignore;
now older, each sickness takes something I need.
It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before
so I open my life and get sewn at the core.