Paper is the organising substance, and the poem tracks it through three states before dropping the word entirely.

Paper roses first. Artificial flowers exist to not die, and the poem’s opening move is to point out that they do anyway — they “turn yellow and fragile,” which is exactly what real roses do, only slower and less beautifully. Whatever was built to last is aging on the same schedule as the thing it replaced.

Then the perfume, “vaporous” before it even begins to disperse, so the dissipation was contained in the noun. Then the agreements, and this is where the poem turns sharp: “paper agreements / in fading ink / cut and bleed.” Paper cuts. The verb is literal — a sheet edge will open skin — and the blood is the poem’s first appearance of anything living. What bleeds is the person, not the document, and the ink fading while the wound opens is a good piece of timing.

The face is the fourth paper object, though the poem never says so. “Red lips, beautiful with tomorrow / turn retribution into / a cruel smirk.” Beautiful with tomorrow is the phrase to notice — a mouth that carries futurity, promise held in an expression. What it turns into is not anger but a smirk, which is smaller and worse. Anger would grant the speaker significance. A smirk withholds it.

The exit is given the poem’s only sound: “the exit shouts / triumphant laughter / as love / walks away.” Doors don’t laugh; the departure does, and the triumph belongs to whoever is leaving. Four lines, and the poem’s one moment of noise sits between two long stretches of quiet.

The ending is where readers will divide. “Alone,” gets a line and a comma, isolated by white space on both sides. Then the yellow paper completes its decay into dust. Then: “my peaceful / solitude / returns.”

Returns is the word the whole poem hangs on. Not arrives, not begins. He had this before, lost it to the relationship, and is getting it back. That reframes everything preceding: the roses, the perfume, the agreements were an interruption in a solitude that predates them and outlasts them. Whether “peaceful” is honest or defensive, the poem does not say. The line break isolating each of the three final words slows the claim to a near-whisper, which reads either as calm settling or as a man convincing himself one word at a time.

Twenty-one lines with no wasted material. The paper conceit holds across four transformations and never has to be explained, and “paper agreements / in fading ink / cut and bleed” is the pivot that earns the poem — three plain words doing damage.

What distinguishes this from the surrounding work is its refusal to complain. The catalog has produced several poems on the same wound in recent weeks, most of them loud. This one states four facts about decay, allows love one line to walk out, and closes on something claimed as peace. The restraint reads as more wounded than the shouting does.

“Beautiful with tomorrow” is the phrase most likely to stay with a reader, though it is also the one place the syntax strains slightly — the preposition is doing unusual work and a reader may need a second pass.

The reservation is the ending, and it’s a question rather than a fault. “My peaceful solitude returns” can be read as genuine relief or as a man narrating composure he does not have, and the poem gives no evidence for either. Deliberate ambiguity is defensible; here it may simply be unresolved. A single concrete detail in that final stanza — something in the room, something he does — would settle which poem this is without giving up the ambiguity.