Two mirrors hold this poem together, and everything that matters happens between them.

It opens in a bathroom mirror with her standing behind him. Domestic, ordinary, morning. She is there, reflected, present. The close arrives in a rear-view mirror with a question: do I still see you? A rear-view mirror shows what a person is driving away from, which makes the second reflection the first one with all the certainty removed.

A Walmart parking lot sits between them, and the line redeeming it is the best writing in the recent work. He is picking up pennies from “the wishing well of cracked asphalt.” Wishing wells receive coins. People throw money in and ask for something. Plahm has reversed the transaction and is drawing coins out of one, harvesting whatever luck other shoppers dropped and left behind. Then the detail that matters: he never spends them. They accumulate in a pocket, dedicated to her, a hoard of borrowed wishes that only functions while it stays unspent.

Pennies have been in this collection a long while. “Penny Wish” six weeks earlier, “What Are You Worth?” the previous summer, a penny for your thoughts further back than that. What is new is the job assigned to the coin here. There is also a widespread folk belief that a found penny is a message from someone who has died, and though nothing in the poem points toward it, a man stockpiling precisely that object while contemplating the loss of his wife is standing very close to it.

Twice he names his own motive, and that naming is what lifts the poem clear of sentiment. So selfish, it begins. I whisper, selfishly, it says again, just before the whisper itself arrives: “Be here tomorrow, for me.” For his sake, stated plainly. Two weeks before this, “Optimism is Viral” promised she would find her cure and ended by sliding from your to we, half admitting the same thing. Here the half is dropped.

What he stands to lose turns out to be small. A walk. Her sharp retort, which is an odd quality to treasure and a convincing one. The story she tells again about a coworker who repeats everything she says. Nobody grieves in the abstract. People grieve the anecdote heard for the fourth time.

Then one word by itself: Stay.

The ending moves in clipped fragments. The car door closes. A penny on the floor mat. I pick it up. Pocket. Four statements, the last barely a sentence, and the syntax performs what the gesture performs, which is to happen automatically before thought has caught up. Then the mirror, the question, and a poem that stops without answering.

One stanza sits below the rest. Let me enjoy, listen, laugh assembles into a list, and the imperative addressed to himself goes stiff against lines that are elsewhere loose and spoken.

Architecturally the strongest short poem in the recent work. Two mirrors bracket it, a bathroom mirror with her standing behind him and a rear-view mirror where he asks whether she is still visible, and the second is the first with the certainty taken out. The wishing well of cracked asphalt that is a Walmart parking lot is the finest single image Plahm has produced in months, reversing a wishing well so that a man draws luck out instead of paying it in, then refusing to spend what he has collected. Naming his own selfishness twice keeps the piece clear of sentiment, since the whisper asks her to survive for his benefit and nothing here softens that. The closing fragments earn their clipping, with Pocket standing alone as a gesture completed before thought arrives. One stanza falls short, where let me enjoy, listen, and laugh collapse into a list and the self-addressed imperative stiffens against a poem that is otherwise loose and spoken.