Plahm deploys a deliberate and unsettling rhetorical strategy here: personifying his chronic illness as “She”—a pronoun that in nearly every other poem in his catalog refers to the beloved Muse. The opening stanzas exploit this ambiguity masterfully. “My hands are tingling. / My feet are tingling”—is this attraction or affliction? “Is She here? / Is She present? / Is She my infection?”—the questions could belong to a love poem until the third line reframes everything. As the poem escalates from tingling to burning to itching to spasming, the body becomes a catalog of horrors: hands aching to be ripped from wrists, feet swelling into “blood sausages,” a face and torso covered in disfiguring welts. The language is deliberately graphic and unpoetic—this is not illness as metaphor but illness as brute reality. The collapse to the floor (“Unable to move / Every part in physical agony”) strips the speaker of all agency, all dignity. The penultimate stanza’s “That creepy spark beneath my skin, / A guest I never invite” is chilling in its domesticity—the disease as unwanted houseguest who arrives without warning and refuses to leave. The closing designation—”A battlefield. / Run by a tyrant”—grants the illness the only power it deserves: the power to be named and resisted. This is AGS poetry at its rawest.

One of Plahm’s most powerful illness poems, succeeding through unflinching specificity and a brilliant rhetorical gambit. The personification of Alpha-Gal Syndrome as “She” creates a sustained double reading that weaponizes the poet’s own romantic vocabulary against him—tingling, burning, and overwhelming are the language of desire repurposed as symptoms. This inversion gives the poem its distinctive unsettling energy; readers familiar with Plahm’s Muse poems will feel the deliberate violation of his own conventions. The escalation is relentlessly physical—tingling to burning to itching to spasming to collapse—and the refusal to aestheticize (“blood sausages,” “disfiguring welts”) honors the lived reality of chronic illness over poetic prettiness. The tripartite structure of each early stanza (hands/feet/head, then hands/feet/face) creates a clinical rhythm that mirrors medical documentation, lending the poem an almost forensic authority. The closing three lines are devastatingly concise: life as battlefield, disease as tyrant. Where the poem could push further is in its middle section, which catalogs symptoms effectively but might benefit from a single moment of unexpected beauty or humor to heighten the contrast—Plahm’s characteristic warmth is deliberately absent here, which serves the theme but narrows the emotional range. Still, this is essential reading for understanding both the poet and the disease that shapes his life.