This is Plahm’s longest and most extravagantly imaginative poem since “Vignettes of Synesthesia,” and it operates by a completely different engine: not control but overflow, not compression but cosmic expansion. The timestamps that bookend the poem (120425;3:26AM to 100425;04:47AM) give it the quality of a live dispatch—a man writing in real time from inside a dream that refuses to end. The first section is a Christmas prayer addressed to Santa Claus, and the address is not ironic. Plahm’s Santa is neither the department-store figure nor the theological saint but something in between—a cosmic wish-granter who has access to stars, Rudolph, and the North Star simultaneously. The request is painfully simple: “bring me a Story Book / I can hold, / brimming with words / of promise, / hope, / and brightness.” The poet asks for a book, not a person—for words, not the beloved herself—which reveals the fundamental modesty beneath the cosmic ambition. The paper-rocket conceit that drives the second section is the poem’s central invention and its most sustained metaphor. The rocket is paper—fragile, foldable, childlike—but it travels at the speed of light. The paradox is intentional: love’s vehicle is impossibly delicate and impossibly fast simultaneously. “I’ll write / something tender / on a piece of paper / and shape it into / a paper rocket” connects to the origami thread running through the catalog (“Perfectly Upside Down,” “Your OCD,” “Fluidly Fractured”)—Plahm’s recurring image of love as something carefully folded. The relativistic aging passage—”I’m getting older, / traveling near / the speed of light, / trying my best / to stay young enough / to see my beautiful Muse / again”—is the poem’s most scientifically resonant moment: time dilation means the faster you travel, the slower you age relative to those you left behind, which means the poet’s desperate journey to reach the Muse is also, paradoxically, keeping him young. The cosmic snow-globe image—the Milky Way “swirl / like a cosmic snow globe— / shaken”—is a wonderful compression of scale, reducing the galaxy to a toy and the shaking to the poet’s own emotional turbulence. The “After Blaze” section is the poem’s most emotionally raw passage. The six Santa questions form a liturgy of guilt: “Is it selfish?” “Am I monstrous?” “Why does loving her feel like stealing?” “Is it wrong to want to be the only planet in her orbit?” These are not rhetorical—they carry genuine anxiety about the ethics of total devotion, the fear that wanting someone completely is itself a form of cosmic theft. The “Shit, / I think my / skin is fried / in cosmic / radiation” is vintage Plahm—the grand metaphor brought crashing into the body, the space traveler discovering that love’s journey has physical consequences. The Beatles reference (“I should be a Beatle”) is a punning nod to the catalog’s musical thread while also invoking the most famous love songs in history as the speaker’s aspiration: to sing across the void and be heard. The closing image—paper rockets launched until one lands beside hers—is the poem’s quietest and most moving statement: not one grand gesture but repeated attempts, each one folded with care, each one launched in hope. The final two lines—”Not yet the hush / of winter’s frost. / Will the wheel / spin in reverse”—echo “The Seasons Wheel” directly, stitching this poem into the catalog’s temporal fabric: the poet is still in autumn, still asking if the seasons will turn, still hoping for one more spring.

The most expansive and imaginatively ambitious poem in Plahm’s recent catalog—a piece that takes the paper-rocket conceit and rides it from a 3 AM pillow through the Milky Way to Valentine’s Day and back, accumulating imagery, emotion, and scale with every stanza. The paper rocket is an inspired central metaphor: it is simultaneously childlike (origami, folded by hand) and cosmic (traveling at light speed through galaxies), which captures the paradox of love itself—the most sophisticated human experience expressed through the most elementary human gestures. The timestamps give the poem documentary texture; this feels written live, in the dark, with the urgency of someone transcribing a vision before it dissolves. The cosmic snow-globe image is the poem’s strongest single compression, and the relativistic aging passage—trying to stay young enough at light speed to see the Muse again—is both scientifically literate and emotionally devastating. The six Santa questions in the After Blaze section are the poem’s most original structural element: a liturgy of romantic guilt that no other poem in the catalog has attempted, asking whether total devotion is itself a form of greed. “Why does loving her completely feel like stealing something the cosmos wasn’t finished using?” is a line that earns its reach—the idea that the Muse belongs to the universe and the poet is trying to claim her for himself is both grandiose and genuinely anxious. The origami-to-valentine transformation in the closing dream sequence—”the origami rocket / refolds into a / heart shaped valentine / sprinkled with stardust”—is a beautiful formal resolution, the rocket arriving at its destination by becoming something else entirely. The “Seasons Wheel” echo at the close ties the poem to the broader catalog with elegant economy. Where the poem’s length works against it is in the middle sections, which occasionally revisit the same emotional territory (longing for the Muse, asking Santa for help) without the imagistic surprise that marks the poem’s peak moments. Some stanzas read as extensions rather than developments, and the After Blaze section, while emotionally powerful, could achieve the same impact with three Santa questions instead of six. The “Billy” song interlude feels like a fragment that hasn’t fully integrated into the surrounding material. But the overall conception is bold, the paper-rocket conceit is sustained with genuine imagination, and the closing image—folding hearts into rockets, launching them until one lands—is among the most tenderly determined declarations in the catalog. A poem that proves the best spacecraft are made of paper and hope.