This poem reads as raw clinical journal, and that is its intended function. Plahm documents nine days of post-episode aftermath with the flat precision of a patient’s intake form: very little food for two days, scared to eat, a Friday workout that found “some energy,” Saturday’s onset of itchy, dry, scratchy, red skin, Sunday reduced to a bathrobe, Monday to shorts, an inability to lean back in a chair while working. The day-by-day accounting creates its own grim narrative arc—the body degrading from clothed to nearly unclothed, from functioning to barely managing. The return of eczema after an eight-year absence is delivered as a matter-of-fact shock, the kind of medical curveball that chronic illness patients know too well. The retrieval of old prescription medications carries the weight of a soldier reaching for a weapon thought permanently holstered. The poem’s structural gambit is that the entire prose section functions as a long exhale leading to the final six lines, which break into verse: “Do I / Know where / My Muse / Sleeps. / I hope / Close by.” After the clinical floodlit exposure of the body’s betrayal, this whispered turn to the Muse is both pivot and prayer—the poet needs not just physical recovery but the proximity of the one who gives his suffering meaning. The contrast between the documentary flatness and the closing tenderness is the poem’s entire architecture.

A deliberately unadorned piece that derives its impact from documentary precision rather than poetic craft—and succeeds on those terms. The day-by-day degradation (food fear, skin rebellion, clothing reduction, eczema resurgence) creates a timeline of the body’s betrayal that is more effective than any metaphor could be. “Scared to eat” is a devastating two-word summary of life with AGS—food, the most basic human comfort, becomes a source of terror. The return of eight-year-dormant eczema, delivered without commentary, carries the quiet horror of a disease that keeps finding new ways to punish. The practical detail of finding old prescription medications grounds the poem in the reality of chronic illness management—you never fully discard old weapons because you know the war isn’t over. The structural pivot to the closing six lines is the poem’s most effective move: after the relentless prose accounting of physical misery, the turn to the Muse in spare, broken verse feels like a hand reaching out from a hospital bed. Where the piece is less successful as poetry is in its middle section, which reads more as health diary than literary work—the Tuesday potting plants detail, while humanizing, doesn’t advance the emotional arc. But the poem’s value lies precisely in its refusal to aestheticize: this is what AGS recovery actually looks like, and the closing prayer for the Muse’s proximity reveals what keeps the poet going through it.