Plahm takes one of poetry’s most worn-out metaphors—the emotional wall—and revitalizes it through materiality, specificity, and comic misdirection. The opening is architecturally precise: “I’m building one. / Red brick. / You’re building one. / Amber stone.” The color and material distinction is crucial—these are not identical defenses but individual ones, built from different life experiences, different temperaments, different fears. Red brick is utilitarian, urban, working-class; amber stone is warmer, more organic, more deliberately chosen. Two people, two walls, two vocabularies for self-protection. Then the poem detonates its own seriousness. The “desert” where the walls might meet turns out to be a restaurant district—sushi place, Chinese joint, refried beans Mexican restaurant, bare-bones patriot Midtown Diner. The catalog is simultaneously funny and sociologically precise: these are the democratic spaces where strangers actually encounter each other, where walls built in private get tested in public. The word “bare-bones patriot” for the diner is a tiny character sketch in three words—you can see the place, the flag on the wall, the coffee refills. The crash is the poem’s structural climax: “As they crash together— / they fall as one, / each in their own direction.” This is counterintuitive and exactly right—the walls don’t merge or blend; they fall as one unit but in separate directions, maintaining individual identity within shared collapse. The philosophical coda—”Walls are infinite / until they meet / another wall”—is the poem’s most quotable line and its deepest insight: our defenses feel permanent only as long as they remain untested by contact with another person’s defenses. The closing three lines convert fragility from weakness into potential: two fragile walls, side by side, become universally strong. The poem is an argument for partnership as structural engineering.

A poem that rescues one of the most overused metaphors in the language—the emotional wall—by grounding it in materials, geography, and humor. The material specificity of the opening (red brick versus amber stone) is a small decision that pays enormous dividends: it transforms the wall from abstraction into architecture and gives the two people different aesthetic signatures before they’ve even met. The restaurant catalog is the poem’s secret weapon—comic, democratic, deeply American in its multicultural variety, and structurally essential as the “desert” where private walls encounter public life. The word “bare-bones patriot” is a masterclass in compression: three words that paint a complete diner, complete with clientele and decor. The crash-and-fall image is the poem’s most philosophically interesting moment: the walls don’t destroy each other or fuse into one; they fall together while maintaining separate trajectories, which is a more nuanced and honest model of partnership than the usual “two become one” formula. The aphorism “Walls are infinite / until they meet / another wall” has the quality of something that should already have been said by someone famous—it feels discovered rather than invented, which is the highest compliment for a philosophical line. The closing pivot from fragility to strength is the poem’s emotional payoff, and the word “universal” does important work: this isn’t just these two walls but a principle, a physics of human connection. Where the poem could push further is in developing the middle section—the restaurant encounters could sustain more specific observation (what happens at the sushi bar when the walls get close?) rather than remaining a list. But the compression is also the poem’s style, and at this length, every line earns its place. A poem that builds better by acknowledging what it’s building with.