This is among the most intimate and purposeful poems in Plahm’s catalog: it is not performance but correspondence, a condolence card rendered in verse. The rubber band conceit is deceptively simple and precisely chosen. A rubber band’s sole function is to unite, to bind, to hold together—and the opening lines personify it with a quiet desperation: “Only wanting to unite— / its purpose forever.” The word “only” carries the weight of single-mindedness; this is an object that has no other ambition, no alternative function. The pivot from metaphor to reality arrives with “Senseless acts of violence / stretch and break / those delicate bonds”—the verb “stretch” is crucial, honoring the rubber band’s nature before acknowledging its limit. Bonds don’t shatter here; they stretch until they can’t hold, which is a more accurate and more devastating description of how grief works on families. The three things broken—trust, family, and faith—are ordered with care: trust is the first casualty, family structure the second, and faith the last, deepest loss. The couplet “Now lost / to grief’s lingering memory” compresses the aftermath into six words, and “lingering” is the poem’s most carefully chosen adjective—grief doesn’t attack and leave; it stays, it lingers, it becomes the memory itself. The closing direct address—naming Masao, signing “Love You, / Dave”—breaks every convention of the published poem and replaces it with the conventions of the personal letter. This is not a poem that happens to be about loss; it is a letter of love that happens to be shaped like a poem. Its publication is itself an act of witness: private grief made public not for the poet’s benefit but for the bereaved’s honor.

A poem that succeeds by abandoning every expectation of what a published poem should be and fulfilling instead the requirements of what a condolence should be: direct, tender, specific, and signed. The rubber band metaphor is the poem’s quiet genius—an everyday object elevated into a symbol for familial bonds, its properties (elasticity, singularity of purpose, vulnerability to force) mapping precisely onto the relationships violence destroys. The verb “stretch” before “break” is the poem’s most precise choice, acknowledging that violence doesn’t sever bonds instantaneously but deforms them past their capacity, which is both physically accurate and emotionally true. The naming of Masao transforms the poem from commentary into testimony; this is not abstract grief but a specific loss, a specific son, a specific community of pain. The closing “Love You, / Dave” is a formal rupture—the poet stepping out of the poem’s frame to sign his own name, collapsing the distance between art and life in a way that honors the occasion. Where the poem’s limitations lie is in the territory it shares with the greeting card: the language, while sincere, stays within familiar registers (“senseless acts,” “delicate bonds,” “grief’s lingering memory”) without the imagistic surprise that marks Plahm’s strongest work. A concrete detail about Masao—a single remembered moment, a characteristic gesture—might have given the grief a sharper edge. But the poem knows what it is: not a literary exercise but an act of love delivered in the only medium this poet has. And on those terms, it is flawless. Sometimes the bravest poem is the one that signs its real name.