Most people are told that having their wisdom teeth out is routine, even a relief. This speaker treats it as a bereavement. The subtitle, "postpartum for my wisdom teeth," borrows the language of childbirth and its aftermath, and the poem builds a whole emotional state on that borrowing: an operation is over, something has been taken out, and instead of feeling lighter the speaker feels hollowed. The central idea lies in the final line, "but maybe if i had my wisdom teeth i'd love me." Self-love is always conditional, always waiting on the return of something already lost.
The first thing the speaker does is hand the blame to someone else. "The kid in the mirror ripped my wisdom teeth out," she says, and by line four the same kid has become the source of her self-hatred: "the little kid who made me hate my curls." The speaker splits herself in two, with an accusing child on one side and a body that has been wounded on the other. The title "Puppy" may belong to this younger figure, though the poem never says so. It could point to youth, clumsiness and neediness, and perhaps to "puppy fat," the old phrase for childhood softness, which would fit the poem's anxiety about thighs and flaws. That is an interpretation rather than something the text confirms.
The middle of the poem reads like an inventory of a self being assembled. Hair, eyes, teeth, stare, skin, lips and thighs are all itemised, and the materials are costly and borrowed: "paraiba for eyes," "ivory teeth," "coral lipstick." Paraíba is a vivid, almost electric blue-green gemstone, and the speaker explains the choice with "because blue is your favourite," the only moment an outside "you" appears and the only reason offered for any of these changes. Ivory and coral are harvested from living things, which gives weight to the phrase "made from the sacrifice of sleep." Even the gaze is rehearsed: "straightforward stare, never turning to profile." The speaker will show only the angle she can control. The lipstick is there "to prove what i am to the mirror," so the mirror is a judge she must keep persuading, not a neutral object.
Then the pretence slips. "I want my wisdom teeth back, writhing in my bed" is wonderfully ambiguous, since the teeth could be writhing, or the speaker could. Either way the verb recalls the "maggots" from line two, where she wished to be their dinner. The grotesque image and the wish for the teeth's return pull against each other. The aim is stated plainly: "to see myself as a person, not a mass of flaws." She wants to be seen as a person, and she feels reduced to a mass.
The form supports this. The poem is a single sixteen-line block with no stanza breaks, no capital letters, and only one comma, so it has the feel of a thought that cannot find a place to stop. Lines hover around twelve or thirteen syllables, which gives a steady, almost list-like pace. Rhyme appears at the start, with "out" and "grout" in lines one and three, then mostly dissolves, as if the poem's neatness fell away with the teeth. Only faint echoes remain, such as "teeth" and "breath" near the end. Repeated words do the binding instead. "Teeth" appears five times, "mirror" twice, and "blood" frames the second half, first as a "bathtub of blood where i emerge a new person," a baptism of sorts, and later as something that "navigates the spaces between my teeth." The word "navigates" is oddly tender, while "fester a smell in my breath" bends grammar to make the decay sound unstoppable.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of a tidy recovery story. It takes a loss that others would dismiss and lets it carry the weight of a much larger sadness about the body and the self. The irony is sharp: "wisdom" teeth, the ones that mark growing up, are the thing she believes could finally teach her to love herself. The poem's hard-edged, conversational voice avoids both self-pity and consolation. It ends on a "maybe," and that hesitation is honest.