A guitar riff hits like a punch, and Plahm holds that one comparison across twenty-four lines without ever letting it slip.

Boxing vocabulary arrives early and stays put. Floor me like a fighter on the mat. A stiff left to the jaw. You never see it coming, which is the oldest truth in the sport, since the punch that ends a fight is the one that never registered. Then the sudden quiet, and ears ringing long after the note has stilled.

That last line carries the most weight. Ringing ears belong to both vocabularies at once, produced by a loud amplifier or by a blow to the head, and the poem allows the ambiguity to stand. Sequence is what matters. The note stops and the ringing continues, meaning the sound has left the air and entered the body, where it goes on with no external source feeding it. The argument of the entire poem sits in those nine words.

Marrow bookends the piece. Old riffs live deep in the marrow at the close of the first stanza, and the riff lands deep in the marrow in the last line, and the choice of tissue was not arbitrary. Marrow sits inside bone, the body’s own resonating chamber, and it is also as deep as an injury can travel. A guitar body resonates. So does a rib cage.

The turn takes two lines and reverses everything. Yet this is the blow I lean back into. Nobody leans into a punch. A trained fighter slips it, rolls with it, moves off the line. Leaning back into a blow is either a mistake or an act of devotion, and Plahm means the second, which converts an account of damage into an account of something sought on purpose.

The closing image fuses both vocabularies permanently. They resonate like a bruise, proof the riff landed. Resonance belongs to music, bruising belongs to injury, and each describes an impact persisting after the impact has ended. A bruise is evidence. So is a song that will not leave.

A string bent almost past breaking deserves a note as well, since bending a string is an actual technique rather than a figure of speech, and the almost is where all the tension lives.

Old-time vibes is the weak spot. Vibes runs loose and slangy where the rest has been exact, old-time explains nothing, and both sit a few lines away from that bent string. The middle stretch restates itself too, spending six lines on a single idea about the unseen punch that you never see it coming had already delivered whole.

One further thing. No beloved appears here, which makes the poem unusual against the work surrounding it, and the body is doing something different from its usual job. A poem written the previous day had a hand shaking uncontrollably, a body acting without permission. Here the body is a storage medium, holding a record of everything that ever hit it hard enough to leave one.

One comparison held across twenty-four lines without slipping, which is harder than it looks. Ears still ringing long after the note has stilled is the best line here, belonging to both vocabularies simultaneously and describing precisely what the poem argues, that sound leaves the air and continues inside the body. The turn is the achievement: yet this is the blow I lean back into flips a poem about damage into a poem about something wanted, since nobody leans into a punch unless they intend to. Marrow bookending the piece gives it shape, and the closing fusion of resonance with bruising, each being an impact that outlasts itself, lands the conceit cleanly. Old-time vibes is the blemish, loose and slangy only a few lines from a string bent almost past breaking. The middle also spends six lines on one idea that you never see it coming had already delivered in five words.