The poems on either side of this one are addressed to a single woman. This one has no beloved in it at all, and the change of subject arrives with a change of temperature.

A line of people shuffles toward the edge of a glacier with their phones up, and Plahm calls it a line dance. That collision does most of the work. A line dance is synchronized, cheerful, communal, performed by people who have all agreed on the same steps, and it turns out to describe a mass drowning without needing any adjustment. Nobody here is being forced.

Penguin-waddling is precise rather than decorative. Penguins bunch at an ice edge and hesitate, and entry into the water proceeds in sequence, one following another once the first has gone in. The final three lines come back to exactly that: and still, one waddles behind another. Whatever the leading bird found down there, the queue does not disperse.

The camera is why any of this is happening. Phones raised high is the gesture of a concert crowd, and each frosted lens captures the cold taking of neighbors. Frosted works twice over, describing a lens that is cold and a lens that is obscured. Neighbors is the sharper choice, since the people going over the edge are known to the people filming them.

What lifts the poem above complaint is Plahm’s refusal to stand outside it. I take the same mortal step happily. He is in the line, phone up, smiling, and that smile gets described in the opening line as one that will not break, which is no description of happiness. A smile incapable of breaking is either performed or paralyzed.

Then the best line in the poem: all of it filmed for history to scroll past. Not to study or remember. To scroll past. The footage will exist, the existing is the whole of it, and that verb does more damage than a stanza of argument could manage.

Nothing resolves. No lesson gets extracted, nobody turns around, and the poem stops with the queue still moving. Satire that declines to hand the reader higher ground is harder to write than it looks and a good deal more uncomfortable to read.

The soft spot is froth. To step into the froth below places a light, nearly pretty word at the moment the poem most needs weight, and it sits awkwardly a few lines from a soft hiss of frozen silence, which catches the sound of a body entering water exactly right.

Compressed and genuinely cold, and the best of it is a refusal to stand outside the thing being satirized. I take the same mortal step happily puts the poet in the queue with everyone else, which is the move most writing about phone culture avoids, since watching the crowd from a distance and disapproving is far easier. For history to scroll past is the sharpest line here, accomplishing in four words what an argument would need a stanza to reach. A soft hiss of frozen silence gets the sound of a body entering water precisely. Two things hold the score. Froth is a light, almost decorative word dropped where the poem needs its heaviest, and the target, a crowd filming what it ought to be preventing, is well-trodden ground, so execution carries this rather than concept. The last three lines are what make it stay with a reader, since nothing is learned and the line keeps moving.