This compact, deceptively simple poem operates on multiple registers simultaneously. The opening line functions as both whiskey tasting note and AGS episode description: “A long slow burn then a smoky delectable tidbit followed by another long slow burn.” The NATO phonetic spelling—Whiskey Oscar Whiskey—transforms “WOW” from casual exclamation into military communication, as if reporting from a battlefield. What follows is a series of hard-won aphorisms delivered with the clarity of someone recently returned from the edge: “I sip, I gasp, I breathe, I live again” compresses the entire recovery arc into a single line. The poem’s philosophical center—”Without knowing something good, / How would we know something bad?”—refuses sentimentality by framing suffering as epistemological necessity rather than spiritual trial. The raw confession “I was honestly in awe of thinking I was dead lying on the floor” connects directly to the “Four Seconds (Of Heaven)” sequence, grounding the abstraction in bodily reality. The distinction between physical and emotional recovery timelines shows hard-earned medical literacy. The closing—”W(One)” reducing WOW to a single, solitary numeral—and the final question of whether “the repose will continue” leaves the poem suspended between hope and dread, which is precisely where the AGS patient lives.

A poem that achieves remarkable density in a small frame. The NATO phonetic conceit gives the piece structural identity without overwhelming it—WOW becomes simultaneously an exclamation of wonder, a distress signal, and a tasting note. The opening line’s double duty as whiskey description and illness narrative is the kind of compression Plahm handles at his best, and the aphoristic mode suits the post-crisis clarity the poem describes. “I sip, I gasp, I breathe, I live again” is among the most efficient lines in the catalog—four verbs tracing the full journey from indulgence to crisis to survival. The philosophical couplet about knowing good and bad avoids platitude by arriving after, not before, the confession of lying on the floor thinking he was dead; earned wisdom rather than greeting-card sentiment. The closing wordplay—”W(One)”—is quietly brilliant, collapsing WOW into solitude, into singularity, into the loneliness of the survivor. Where the poem risks losing readers is in its brevity and its movement between registers: the tasting-note opening, the aphoristic middle, and the confessional aside about the floor episode feel like fragments from different poems stitched together. But that fragmentation may be the point—this is what consciousness sounds like when reassembling itself after collapse. The final suspended question—will the repose continue?—refuses false closure, honoring the uncertainty that defines chronic illness.