Plahm turns a frozen dessert into a philosophy of longing. The gelato—”Deliciously decadent, untouched, / Waiting in my freezer”—becomes the perfect emblem for desire that remains in potential: rich, available, yet unconsumed. Around this central image, the poem choreographs a slow-motion encounter. The beloved materializes from the periphery (“From the corner of my eye”) through a series of fragments: confidence, silhouette, electric look, sophisticated dress. The speaker’s response escalates from curiosity to fascination to the threshold moment: “extend my hand, / say, Hi. I’m Captivated.” The poem’s great insight is that it never crosses that threshold. Instead, it dwells in the “delicious uncertainty / Of Maybe”—treating the pre-romantic space not as frustration but as its own rich experience. The confession that the actual gelato has sat untouched for over a year brilliantly collapses metaphor and reality: the poet savors possibility in both love and dessert. The closing question—”Which should I pursue? / Or should I share— / the indulgence of you, and gelato?”—refuses resolution with a wink, suggesting that some pleasures are best left hovering between anticipation and fulfillment. The poem is structured like a slow approach across a room, each stanza one step closer, and the reader feels the magnetic pull of that narrowing distance.

A seductive, structurally inventive poem that finds its power in what it refuses to resolve. The gelato conceit is inspired—frozen, decadent, untouched—and Plahm milks it without over-explaining, letting the metaphor do its work through strategic returns rather than heavy-handed insistence. The poem’s pacing mirrors attraction itself: the slow peripheral glimpse, the sharpening focus, the internal debate, the almost-approach. Each stanza tightens the distance between speaker and subject without ever arriving, and this sustained tension is the poem’s engine. The line “Hi. I’m Captivated” is a gem—simultaneously an introduction and a confession, the kind of thing you’d never actually say but wish you could. The confession that the real gelato has languished for a year is a masterful comic beat that also deepens the theme: this is a poet who understands that some of life’s richest experiences exist in the space before consumption. The closing either/or (“Which should I pursue?”) wisely refuses to choose. Minor weakness: a few stanzas in the middle catalog the beloved’s attributes in slightly generic terms (“confidence,” “command,” “sophisticated”) where more specific observation might have sharpened the portrait. But the overall architecture is confident, the tone perfectly balanced between yearning and humor, and the central metaphor is one readers won’t soon forget.