Plahm opens with a disarming admission—”I find truth simple, / emotions, however, hmmm…”—the trailing “hmmm” signaling that what follows will be messy, excessive, uncontrolled. The Latin epigraph, “Amor est incendium,” gives the poem its classical spine: love is not a flame but a conflagration, a fire that consumes the structure it inhabits. The Muse is immediately introduced as a contradiction—”the Ice Queen of dreams, / distant, distraught” but also “A maestro of / hot dreams.” She is simultaneously frozen and igniting, which means the speaker’s burning is entirely his own production; the fire comes from within him, not from her. This is a crucial distinction the poem makes and then promptly ignores, because the speaker is too far gone to care about the source of the flames. The body catalog is the poem’s most accomplished passage. Each detail is given a fire-register companion: red lips are “dangerously soft” (danger + tenderness); warm perfume is “a fire alarm” (alerting but also signaling danger); pink nails “striking sparks / between my ribs” converts the beloved’s hands into flint against the speaker’s skeleton. The image of “cold, indifferent, bluesy eyes— / my incendiary freefall” is the poem’s central oxymoron: cold eyes causing incendiary collapse, ice producing fire. The escalation that follows is deliberate and self-aware: “Smolder / isn’t adequate” is the poet acknowledging that his own vocabulary is insufficient, that the poem needs to go further. “Hand me / that torch— / I need to ignite / everything” is the speaker reaching for external accelerant because the internal fire isn’t enough. Then the darkly comic reversal: “Never mind— / I drank gasoline / and must combust / internally.” The “Never mind” is vintage Plahm deadpan—he’s already swallowed the fuel; the torch is redundant. The closing sequence achieves something rare: genuine pathos inside the fire metaphor. “A torch / held to silk, / one bright moment / of immolation” is the poem’s most beautiful image—silk catching fire is instantaneous, luminous, and irreversible. The single-line “Then nothing.” is a full stop that functions as death, as aftermath, as the silence after a flame goes out. And the final stanza—”Her chill / cannot touch / what is already / ash”—is the poem’s philosophical resolution: the speaker has burned so completely that the Muse’s coldness, the very thing that tortured him, is now powerless. You cannot freeze ash. The fire has consumed even the capacity to be hurt, which is either liberation or annihilation, and the poem refuses to say which.

The most overtly sensual and dangerous poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that takes the fire metaphor further than it’s ever been taken in these pages and arrives at a genuinely surprising philosophical destination. The Latin title and epigraph set a register that the poem then honors: this is not casual warmth but classical conflagration, Catullan in its intensity and self-destruction. The body catalog is the poem’s showpiece—each sensory detail (red lips, warm perfume, pink nails, bluesy eyes) is paired with a fire-register counterpart, and the pairings are specific enough to avoid cliché: “a fire alarm” for perfume is inspired (the scent triggers a warning system the body has no intention of obeying), and nails “striking sparks / between my ribs” gives the beloved’s touch a percussive, almost surgical quality. The escalation from smolder to torch to gasoline to combustion is paced with comic-tragic precision—each step is more absurd and more honest than the last, and the “Never mind” before the gasoline line is Plahm’s deadpan at its finest, the speaker already past the point of no return and narrating his own immolation with a shrug. The torch-to-silk image is the poem’s most lyrical moment, compressing the entire fire metaphor into a single, three-second event: beauty catching, flaring, disappearing. “Then nothing.” is devastatingly effective as a standalone line—two words that function as both a narrative ending and an emotional one. The closing stanza’s logic—ash cannot be chilled—is the poem’s intellectual payoff: the speaker has burned past the beloved’s power to hurt him, which sounds like victory but reads like annihilation. The ambiguity is the poem’s parting gift: is being ash freedom or death? The Ice Queen’s reticence, which opens the poem as a source of torment, closes it as an irrelevance. Where the poem could tighten is in the middle section’s “My Lady / in the dark” stanza, which restates the desire in more conventional terms before the fire imagery fully ignites—the poem is strongest when it stays inside its governing metaphor and weakest when it steps outside it for a few lines of standard Muse address. But the overall arc—from “hmmm” to conflagration to ash to silence—is one of the most dramatically satisfying in the catalog. A poem that proves some fires are worth dying in.