This is one of Plahm’s most tonally ambitious poems, opening with mock-epic grandeur (“In the pantheon of history, / The will of man, / The substance of woman”) then deliberately deflating it to “Spicy hot croutons / And garlic added to my oil.” The bathetic descent is the poem’s thesis: real life is not the pantheon of civilization but the pantheon of the kitchen, and it is no less sacred for being domestic. The poem’s structure mirrors a rambling Friday evening conversation—it wanders from Larry the Cable Guy to jalapeños to holly boughs to charcoal grills, mimicking the associative drift of a mind happily unguarded in the presence of someone it loves. The complementary-opposites section (“If you’re reverent… / I’m irreverent”) and the weekday-knowledge conceit (“I know nothing on Monday / You know nothing on Wednesday / We manage to know / Everything / On Friday”) are among Plahm’s most charming formulations of partnership as collaborative intelligence. But the poem’s emotional depth is hidden in its final third. The single-word-per-line passage about the apron, the halo, and the sorrow is a sudden tonal plunge—the speaker has been performing lightness, and these lines reveal what the performance costs. “The word… / I have never spoken / Echoes / Softly / In these words” is the poem’s most haunting admission: the love is expressed entirely through garlic and grills and Friday night gatherings because the direct word—love itself—cannot be spoken aloud. The closing image, “My / Myth / Is / Glass,” reframes the entire poem: what seemed like playful transparency was vulnerability all along. The dedication to “Brother Doug” anchors the poem in specific relationship, suggesting the poem’s wisdom about partnership was learned, at least in part, from watching someone else’s.

A generous, warm-hearted poem that manages the difficult trick of being funny and profound simultaneously—though it earns its profundity precisely by not reaching for it. The 23 likes feel right for a poem whose pleasures are cumulative rather than immediately striking; it’s a slow-burner that reveals its emotional architecture only on rereading. The mock-epic structure is the poem’s cleverest device: by invoking “the pantheon of history” only to redirect it toward garlic and cutting boards, Plahm argues that domestic love is civilization’s actual engine, not its consolation prize. The complementary-opposites riff is genuinely funny and structurally tight, building a case for partnership as productive disagreement rather than merger. The Larry the Cable Guy reference is a characteristically Plahm move—high and low culture smashed together without apology, insisting that folk wisdom and poetic wisdom drink from the same well. The poem’s hidden power is its tonal shift in the final third, where single-word-per-line stanzas slow the reader to a crawl and reveal that beneath the breezy cooking metaphors, the speaker carries grief (“The / Halo / And / The / Sorrow, / I’ve / worn”) and an inability to say the word that animates everything. This structural reveal—comedy concealing elegy—is sophisticated and moving. Minor weaknesses: the poem’s length invites occasional drift, and some passages feel more like thinking-aloud than finished poetry. The “Git’er done” section, while thematically apt, risks losing readers less familiar with or charmed by the reference. But as a portrait of love expressed through shared meals rather than shared declarations, the poem is both delightful and quietly devastating.