“Mended Valentine” operates in prose rather than verse, reading more like a love letter than a traditional poem, and that’s precisely its power. The piece moves through three emotional movements: acknowledgment of damage (hearts full of holes, drained of emotion), the arrival of healing (someone stepping in to fill those holes), and a vision of lasting partnership (hearts becoming “very, very old friends”). The language is deliberately unadorned—no metaphorical pyrotechnics, no structural acrobatics—because the subject demands sincerity over style. The phrase “tried and true, through and through” uses internal rhyme almost unconsciously, the way someone speaking from the heart might accidentally stumble into music. The pivot in the third paragraph is the poem’s boldest move: comparing the beloved to the sun is one of poetry’s oldest gestures, but Plahm earns it by placing it after the vulnerability of the opening, so it reads not as cliché but as testimony. The final two words—”You. Waking.”—are the poem’s emotional center, and their placement after a period and line break gives them the weight of revelation. Everything before has been abstraction and declaration; this is the concrete moment that proves all of it true. A single image of the beloved opening their eyes in morning light becomes the evidence for every claim the poem has made. Available as a greeting card in the shop, the piece is perfectly suited to that format—it speaks directly, warmly, and without irony, which is exactly what a card needs to do while still carrying genuine literary weight. The subtitle “Old Friends” reframes romantic love as deep companionship, a mature perspective that distinguishes this from conventional Valentine’s fare.

A quietly effective prose poem that succeeds by refusing to perform. Where much of the HoneyBeeBard catalog thrives on structural invention—cascading line breaks, anaphoric build-ups, tonal shifts from comic to profound—”Mended Valentine” strips everything back to direct emotional address, and the result is one of the most accessible and commercially versatile pieces in the collection. The opening metaphor of hearts with holes is familiar territory, but Plahm avoids sentimentality by pairing it with clinical language (“drained of emotion, energy”) that grounds the image in lived experience rather than greeting-card abstraction. The second paragraph’s vision of hearts as “old friends” is the poem’s most distinctive contribution—it redefines romantic love not as fire or passion but as the slow accumulation of trust, which is both less exciting and more honest than most love poetry dares to be. The 18 likes suggest solid engagement, and the greeting card format is a natural fit: the piece reads beautifully aloud at the pace of someone handing a card across a table. The closing image—”You. Waking.”—is genuinely arresting, a two-word snapshot that contains more intimacy than entire stanzas of more elaborate poems. If there’s a limitation, it’s that the prose format and direct tone don’t offer much to reward re-reading; the poem delivers its emotional payload on first encounter and doesn’t reveal hidden layers on return visits. But as a declaration of renewed love after hardship, spoken plainly and without defense, it achieves something many more complex poems reach for and miss: it sounds like the truth.