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— by David Plahm
Count the inventory of the flesh across these ten poems. A lower lumbar that itches until a hand rubbing it turns the sensation "exotic." A spine that pops only when she squeezes tight. Blue veins running toe to finger. A nose broken twice and set crooked, a wonky toe, fake teeth, two hands in which the left holds memory and the right holds hope. Plahm writes from inside a failing body and declines to read that failure as defeat. In this work the body is not the obstacle to love but the instrument of it.
One rhetorical move recurs across the strongest poems until it hardens into a worldview: the thing that should diminish the speaker becomes the thing that saves him. In "A Singular Moment," a woman's refusal, delivered as "I won't have a relationship with a client," sends the speaker out the door "happier than I had been in a decade or three," rewired by a smile. "Symptoms of You" recasts every ache as proof of the beloved, until the body's complaints read as a diagnosis the speaker is glad to receive. "Is It My Jagged Charm?" arrives at the gentle proposition that even broken beauty has become "intimately beautiful." This is not denial. The pain stays on the page in full. What shifts is the speaker's stance toward it, and that shift is the engine of the whole catalog.
The recipient of all this devotion is seldom named and never fully present. She is the Muse, the Lady, the smile behind the counter, the blue eyes across a restaurant table in "Not Yet." She is the "you" whose memory turns the veins blue in "Today, Life Is Different," and the figure the dreamer will not wake from in "Dreaming," where the poems' images "orbit your gravity." She works less as a character than as a direction, the fixed point the poems keep turning to face.
The ten sort into three registers. The metaphysical poems reach for symbols and states. "Just a Small Share" diagrams love itself as a sequence of marks, moving from a single point to infinity to a heart, and stakes a claim that two hearts make abundance out of "a small share." "The Fourth State" stages something close to liturgy, two hands clapping until doors swing wide toward "boundless light." "Dreaming" dissolves the waking self into a carnival of the unconscious. The embodied poems keep their feet on the ground and their attention on the aging frame; "After an Excellent Workout" is the bright outlier among them, and its 135 likes, the highest of any poem here, suggest readers reward its uncomplicated joy, the post-exercise spill into a "fizzy alchemy" of creation. The origin poems return to beginnings: the founding rejection, the slow weekend courtship built across four movements of fasting and looking and confession, the rebuilding after loss. "Today, Life Is Different" carries the most autobiography on its back, naming the lightning that might "strike again," the greenhouse he may build a second time, the cats Sammy and Pattern, and the hard admission that his "small life" was worth "a hill of beans" only through another person.
So why does this work land now, past the love story at its center? Several of its concerns sit on live contemporary fault lines.
It ages in public. "Is It My Jagged Charm?" and "The Fourth State" treat late life not as decline to be smoothed away but as a condition with its own authority; the mirror laughs and the speaker laughs back. Set against an image culture organized around concealing every flaw, the poems make a case for the dignity of the worn.
Illness speaks here in the first person. "Symptoms of You" reports from "my condition" without ever naming it, and readers living with chronic conditions, including the tick-borne Alpha-Gal Syndrome that shadows Plahm's larger body of work, will know the posture at once: a body that misbehaves, narrated by the person living inside it rather than described from outside.
Reframing is the reflex. The claim in "A Singular Moment" that "sometimes, we need to be told no to realize what our yes should be" reads like folk neuroplasticity, and the language of being "rewired" by experience has migrated from the clinic into ordinary speech. The poem dramatizes that migration in real time.
It treats attention as devotion. The central section of "Not Yet" is built from the act of staring, of dragging the eyes away and back, of looking as the highest thing one person can offer another. In an economy that mines attention for profit, a poem that makes sustained looking sacred runs against the grain.
Rest gets its defense too. "Dreaming" refuses the logic that files sleep under wasted time; its speaker would rather not wake at all, and treats the dreaming mind as a source instead of a gap in output.
The frame has limits, and honesty requires naming them. Reading these poems mainly for their fit with current conversations risks thinning what is most durable in them, which owes nothing to any topic of the moment and everything to one sustained act of attention to a single person across years. The work also rests its full weight on the Muse, and a reader untouched by that figure may find the devotion airless or the feeling unchecked; the rhymed passages, when they surface, sometimes strain for their landings. None of this unseats the accomplishment. It only suggests that the best argument for these poems is constancy rather than timeliness.
Ten poems, one pulse. The body fails, the Muse keeps her distance, and the speaker goes on writing toward both.
Plahm’s most-rated poem turns a private question, whether one heart holds enough, into an argument against scarcity. Its closing equation of point, infinity, and heart compresses a whole spiritual claim into three marks, a symbol-shorthand a generation raised on emoji reads fluently. At a moment when burnout and emotional depletion dominate how people describe their inner lives, the poem insists abundance is made between two people rather than hoarded by one. Faith, here, is simply the willingness to offer the small share first.
Fake teeth, a twice-broken nose, a memory that swaps boxed wine for vermouth and laughs at the error. This poem ages out loud in a culture built to hide aging, and lands on the line that even broken beauty can be “intimately beautiful.” Its relevance is to the slow revolt against filtered, frictionless self-presentation: the speaker stands at the mirror, catalogs the damage, and grins back. Where the image economy rewards concealment, Plahm proposes the worn body as a record worth reading. Imperfection becomes authorship.
The most-liked poem here is also the least troubled. It rides a cascade of bubbles from champagne to dreams to a closing “fizzy alchemy,” catching the state where physical exertion tips over into creative overflow. That link between movement, mood, and making has firm support in current research on exercise and cognition, but the poem reaches it by feel rather than citation. Its popularity, 135 likes and counting, suggests readers are hungry for art that locates joy in the body and treats pleasure, not suffering, as the source of a poem.
Two hands, the left holding memory and the right holding hope, clap until a fourth state opens past waking, sleeping, and dreaming. The poem’s liturgical rhythm gives it the feel of a small rite, and its central image offers a usable tool: a way to hold the past in one hand without letting it close the other. As meditation and consciousness research move further into the mainstream, Plahm’s “fourth state” reads less as mysticism than as a homemade name for the practiced, awakened attention people increasingly seek.
Across four movements, Friday’s fast, two Saturdays of looking, Sunday’s confession, the poem makes a case for slowness. Its heart is the act of staring at a pair of blue eyes and dragging the gaze away when the waitress arrives, attention offered as the highest courtesy. In an economy engineered to capture and resell attention by the second, a poem that treats sustained looking as devotion is quietly subversive. Desire here is paced on purpose, withheld and deferred, a counterargument to a culture that confuses speed with intimacy.
The most openly autobiographical of the ten, threading remembrance, a lost love, and the question “Will lightning strike again?” through a plain, halting voice. It is a poem about second acts: rebuilding a life, even a second greenhouse, after the worst has already happened. Grief and reinvention are constant subjects now, in memoir and in public conversation about resilience, and Plahm’s contribution is its refusal of polish. The speaker admits his life was worth “a hill of beans” only through another, then chooses to keep building anyway.
Every stanza opens from “my condition” and never names it, recasting a misbehaving body, itching lumbar, popping spine, restless feet, as evidence of love rather than alarm. Readers living with chronic illness, including the Alpha-Gal Syndrome that runs through Plahm’s wider work, will recognize the stance: the patient narrating the body from inside, not the chart describing it from outside. As chronic-illness writing and patient advocacy reshape how sickness gets discussed, this poem models one durable response, folding the unruly body into the story of a life rather than exiling it.
Written in alternating English and Italian, scrawled in spirit on a napkin, the poem flips a familiar metaphor: not the light but the darkness is what lets us feel love and know it. Its bilingual texture makes intimacy a cross-cultural act, and its gratitude for “love and vino” reads as a small practice rather than a grand gesture. For readers who have learned to look for meaning inside hard stretches rather than only in bright ones, the inversion rings true. The humble napkin, not the monument, is where the deepest thing gets written.
The catalog’s origin story: a rejection, “I won’t have a relationship with a client,” that leaves the speaker not crushed but ecstatic, “rewired by a smile.” Its governing claim, that we sometimes need a no to find our real yes, reads like folk neuroplasticity, and arrives just as the language of rewiring and post-traumatic growth has entered everyday speech. The poem dramatizes resilience without the jargon: a single morning, a single refusal, a life redirected. It is the rare love poem powered entirely by being turned down.
A long unspooling of dream-images, the unconscious as carnival and cinema, the Muse glimpsed in fog, the sleeper who would rather not wake. The poem treats dreaming as a source instead of dead time, and its speaker guards sleep the way others guard productivity. Against a culture that prizes constant output and files rest under waste, Plahm’s refusal to wake becomes a quiet argument for the dreaming mind. The longing at its center, for something “impossible to grasp,” is the engine that keeps the dream, and the poem, alive.
