This is the least forgiving poem Plahm has written in a long while, and it earns its severity only in the final six lines.

The subject is a hand. Three-inch nails, glue, glitter, borrowed shades, filed until they click like switchblades. Click is the detail that convinces, since acrylic nails genuinely do click against every surface they meet and a switchblade opening makes the same small sound, so a piece of plain sensory observation arrives with a weapon already inside it.

Forge does double duty in the fourth line. To forge is to work metal into a blade and it is also to counterfeit, and grandeur assembled from glue and glitter qualifies as both manufactured and fake. Borrowed shades operates identically, naming a nail color and a personality put together out of other people.

Then the pun the whole poem is built on. Sharp enough to wound, and call that making a point. Nails have points and arguments have points, and the line accuses its subject of confusing the two, of mistaking the capacity to hurt for the capacity to be right. That confusion is common enough that the joke lands harder than a joke ought to.

Then the shift, which is what rescues the poem from simple cruelty. The dagger goes in and nothing comes back. What remains is a glittered hand reaching toward its own reflection, desperate to feel the sting of something real. The attacks are not producing anything. They are attempts at sensation by someone who has stopped feeling much, and once that is established the poem has stopped describing a villain. It is describing a person in trouble, armed to the teeth and getting nothing for it.

The last three lines are the best writing here and they are physically exact. Clench that hand. Make a fist. Feel your own daggers. Three-inch nails driven into a palm by their owner’s own grip. Whatever those weapons were built for, the person holding them is the only one they can reliably reach.

Set beside a poem written eleven days earlier, the pairing turns instructive. “A Dangerous Beauty” also converts a woman’s glamour into armament, with heels cocking like a hammer and a smile that disarms before she draws, and finds the arrangement thrilling. Daggers takes the identical equation of beauty and weaponry and returns the opposite verdict. One poem wants to be shot. The other watches a hand close on its own blades.

Hands have been accumulating throughout the recent work. A body that twitches and gestures without permission. A hand that shakes uncontrollably. A body storing every impact it ever absorbed. Here a hand is the whole poem, and it is the only one of them that chose its condition.

Where the writing loosens is file them against the night, which sounds like something and means very little, and aim them like an argument, which goes abstract inside a stanza otherwise full of objects. The opening aphorism is a strong statement and a weaker beginning, since this poem is considerably better when it shows than when it declares.

Sharp, dense, and the only poem in the recent work written in anger. Click like switchblades is the detail that makes it work, since acrylic nails really do click and a blade opening makes an identical sound, so ordinary observation arrives already armed. The governing pun holds up: sharp enough to wound and call that making a point catches the confusion between hurting somebody and being right about something. What lifts the piece past simple cruelty is the turn in the last third, where the attacks stop yielding anything and the glittered hand reaches toward a mirror desperate to feel the sting of something real, converting an attack into a diagnosis. The close is physically exact and the best writing in the poem, since three-inch nails clenched into a fist can only reach one person. Against that, file them against the night sounds well and means little, aim them like an argument goes abstract among concrete things, and the opening aphorism declares where the rest of the poem shows.