This may be the most emotionally devastating poem in Plahm’s catalog. The opening line—”I collapsed on the floor— / Unknowingly letting go of the world”—is delivered with the eerie calm of someone reporting from the far side of consciousness. What follows is not the expected horror of near-death but its opposite: a description of those four seconds as heaven. The associations are sensual and tender—a lingering touch after lovemaking, a piano riff from My Morning Jacket’s “Time Waited,” a gentle caress, vision clear, mind at ease. The body is “without feeling,” and the speaker is “In awe of my state of not-being.” Then reality returns with savage force: “excruciating reality / painfully roared back in.” The plea that follows—”Crying, / wishing that version of death / would come back”—is among the most raw lines Plahm has written. “Take me back— / Or release me / to my Muse” offers two versions of salvation: death’s peace or the beloved’s presence. The second half shifts to clinical post-mortem: no phone within reach, no watch to send SOS, EpiPens in another room, Benadryl packaging impossible to open, no one who would have known for days. This forensic inventory of near-fatal isolation is as chilling as the collapse itself. The closing—”I might have been on Mars. / Maybe— / I belong there”—carries the double weight of cosmic loneliness and the quiet suspicion that the other side might be where he’s meant to be. A profoundly honest confrontation with mortality that refuses to soften its edges.

Among the most powerful and unsettling poems in Plahm’s entire body of work. The structural architecture is flawless: four seconds of transcendent peace, the violent return to consciousness, the emotional aftermath, the practical forensics of near-fatal isolation. Each section operates in a different register—sensual reverie, physical agony, raw grief, clinical accounting—and the transitions between them mirror the disorientation of the experience itself. The association of near-death with post-lovemaking tenderness and a specific piano riff is a stroke of genius; it makes the four seconds not abstractly peaceful but concretely, sensuously beautiful, which makes the return to pain proportionally more devastating. The plea “Take me back— / Or release me / to my Muse” is a masterful double-edged line—both suicidal honesty and romantic devotion compressed into a single breath. The second half’s inventory of failed safety measures (unreachable phone, unworn watch, distant EpiPens, impenetrable Benadryl packaging) is devastating in its accumulation: each detail is another way the world was not prepared to save him. The observation that “No one would have known to come collect me for days” is perhaps the poem’s most quietly horrifying line—chronic illness compounded by isolation. The closing Mars image is perfectly calibrated: alien, distant, possibly where he belongs. The self-referential “Another patch / On my quilt” ties this to the broader tapestry of his work without diminishing its singular impact. This poem demands to be read slowly and more than once.