The title’s triple “Why” is the poem’s spine, and it carries different weight in each half. In the opening section, the question is romantic: why do I love you so deeply, why do I continue this pursuit, why am I mystified? The parenthetical self-corrections—”(no, I do)” and “It’s not a question, / it’s a statement”—show a speaker arguing with his own interrogative mode, trying to convert questions into declarations but failing because love, by its nature, resists explanation. The line “Only you / answer / why” is the section’s pivot: the beloved holds the answer to a question the poet cannot formulate. The confession “It’s completely alien” connects to the broader catalog’s recurring theme of love as something the speaker has never fully known but feels with overwhelming intensity. Then the poem ruptures. “Hey! Hey! the Gang’s All Here!” arrives like a door kicked open, and the sardonic title—borrowed from a drinking song—sets a tone of grim, disbelieving irony. What follows is among Plahm’s most socially engaged and emotionally harrowing writing. The catalog of emotions the speaker cannot choose between (Sad, Happy, Thankful, Confused, Disparate, Afraid, Respectful?) is devastating in its honesty—each word standing alone on its own line, each one a legitimate and contradictory response. The description of the gang members as “the most / perfect / witnesses / of honoring / a young innocent / of their own violence” is the poem’s most cutting line: perfect witnesses to their own destruction, honoring what they themselves created the conditions to destroy. The progression from “prison tats, / gang regalia, / false honor, / bravado” to “Dignified / In reverence” captures the impossible coexistence of performed toughness and genuine grief. The countdown from 24 to birth—”a child, / still a glimmer in his mother’s eye / a baby held, / loved skin on loved skin at birth”—reverses time itself, unwinding the life back to its beginning to show what was lost. The lowercase “god only knows what that feels like” is the poem’s most vulnerable moment: the divine reduced to a whisper, the poet admitting there are experiences even his empathetic imagination cannot reach. The closing “Why, why, why” returns the refrain to close the frame, but now it carries the weight of both halves: why do I love, why did he die, why does the world work this way. The same three words, unanswerable in both directions.

One of the most structurally daring and emotionally complex poems in Plahm’s catalog. The decision to join a love poem and a gang funeral elegy under a single refrain is audacious, and it works because both halves interrogate the same mystery: the inability to explain why we feel what we feel, whether that feeling is love or grief. The first section’s stammering self-corrections (“no, I do,” “it’s a statement”) enact the confusion they describe, and the admission that the entire experience is “completely alien” connects to the catalog’s foundational paradox of a man who feels deeply what he has never fully known. The second section is among Plahm’s most powerful social writing. The single-word emotion list (Sad / Happy / Thankful / Confused / Disparate / Afraid / Respectful?) is formally striking—each word isolated on its line like a person standing alone in a crowd—and the question mark after “Respectful” is the section’s most honest punctuation, acknowledging uncertainty about even the most basic social response. The oxymoron of gang members as “perfect witnesses of honoring a young innocent of their own violence” is devastating in its precision: it identifies the structural irony of a community mourning what its own culture produced. The reverse chronology from 24 to birth is emotionally unanswerable—each step backward strips another layer of toughness away until all that remains is skin on skin. The distinction “I cry for him. / But I weep for his mother” is the poem’s most emotionally precise moment: crying and weeping as different magnitudes of grief, the son’s death sad but the mother’s survival unbearable. The closing return of “Why, why, why” gains enormous cumulative power from carrying both halves’ questions in three syllables. Where the poem risks losing coherence is in the transition between the two sections—the shift from romantic mystification to gang funeral is abrupt, and some readers may struggle to connect them until the closing refrain reveals the structural logic. But the abruptness may be the point: life delivers its “whys” without transitions, and the poem honors that disorder. A poem that asks the hardest question three times and refuses, with complete integrity, to answer it even once.