This poem operates as both companion piece and intensification of the earlier “She Is My Infection.” The triadic structure of the opening stanzas—hands/feet/head tingling, then hands/feet/face burning, then folds/arms/thighs seizing—creates an almost clinical escalation chart rendered as anaphoric verse. The questions “Is She here? / Is She present? / Is She (exhaustion) my infection?” carry genuine dread because the answer is already known; the asking is itself a symptom, the mind’s last attempt to negotiate before the body surrenders. The pronoun game remains devastatingly effective: “She” as disease occupies exactly the grammatical space “She” as Muse occupies elsewhere in the catalog, so every tender poem about the beloved is shadowed by this other She who also visits, also overwhelms, also takes over the body. The visceral details—blood sausages for feet, disfiguring welts, the creepy spark beneath the skin—refuse metaphor in favor of testimony. The structural pivot “Before my untimely death—” drops a trapdoor under the reader. The temporal revelation at the end—”All that / in fifteen minutes / of hell. / Then… / another hour or two to follow”—reframes the entire preceding horror as compressed into an impossibly short window, making the suffering more intense, not less. The bold-faced coda acknowledges that even writing the poem triggers physical memory, the ghost returning through language itself. Essential AGS documentation that functions equally as literature.

A poem that justifies its existence as a sequel by deepening rather than merely repeating the earlier “She Is My Infection.” The triadic anaphoric structure—three symptoms per stanza, three stanzas of escalation—gives the piece an almost liturgical quality, as if the body is reciting its own stations of suffering. The personification of AGS as “She” remains one of Plahm’s most unsettling inventions, and this poem exploits the device further by adding the questions (“Is She here?”) that transform the pronoun from metaphor into something closer to haunting—a presence that announces itself through the body’s own signals before the mind can catch up. The physical details are unflinching and specific: blood sausages, disfiguring welts, the spark beneath the skin. These earn the poem’s credibility as testimony. The temporal revelation near the close is masterful—learning that this catalog of horrors unfolds in fifteen minutes forces the reader to recalibrate everything they’ve just absorbed. The bold-faced coda, acknowledging that writing the poem itself triggers somatic memory, adds a metatextual layer that most illness poetry never attempts: the act of documentation is not neutral, it is itself an exposure. Where the poem could be stronger is in the middle section’s transition from clinical escalation to the “six feet under” passage, which briefly reaches for conventional language before recovering. But the closing sequence—”I’m still breathing. / That’s the miracle.”—is earned in every syllable, and the final line’s certainty that She will return refuses the false comfort of resolution.