Four lines are enough for Abbie to describe a poem that can't be finished, and in doing so to finish one. The speaker says that every time they try to write about "us," their body gets in the way. The fingers "stutter," the closing lines come out "in hiccups," and the heart "chokes" the hand that holds the pen. Underneath is a simple, painful admission: the breakups are too big to be put into words, or even to be accepted. The central idea is that grief can interrupt the very act of expressing it, so the poem becomes proof of its own claim.
The most striking choice is how the speaker borrows the language of speech and the throat and applies it to writing. People stutter with their mouths, yet here it is the "fingers" that stutter, as if the pen were a second voice that loses its nerve. The word also sounds like what it describes, with its doubled *t* tripping over itself. "Hiccups" works similarly, with its sharp *k* and *p* sounds, and it also suggests something involuntary, a spasm no one chooses. There is a little comedy in a hiccup, which keeps the poem from becoming melodramatic. The speaker seems to know their struggle looks a bit ridiculous, and says so anyway.
The rhyme is easy to miss because it arrives only at the end. The first and third lines ("stutter," "hand") don't match, but "hiccups" and "breakups" lock together as the poem's closing sound. That pairing links the two ideas: the bodily glitch and the emotional wound are the same thing. The shared "-ups" also carries a faint upward motion, which fits the final line. Something you cannot swallow is something that keeps coming back up. The poem's last word, "breakups," is plural, which suggests this has happened more than once, an on-and-off pattern the speaker has never managed to digest. That is a reading drawn from the plural, not a fact the poem states, but it fits the weary repetition of "every time" and "always."
Those two words matter more than they seem. "Every time" opens the poem and "always" appears twice, so in four lines we are told that this failure is a habit, a loop. The speaker has tried and failed before, and will again. The length of the lines also seems to enact the problem. The first is long and rambling, as if the speaker is trying to push a whole sentence out in one go. The third is short and clotted with one-syllable words ("My heart always chokes my hand"), and the semicolon at its end works like a gulp before the last line. The second line begins with a lowercase "the" right after a full stop, and whether intentional or not, it gives the line a slightly broken, tumbling-out quality that suits the subject.
The central image, a heart choking a hand, is anatomically odd, and that is why it works. The heart is in the chest and the hand is far away, yet the poem imagines emotion travelling down the arm and gripping it by the throat, as though the hand had one. It turns a feeling into a physical struggle between two parts of the same person, one that wants to speak and one that wants to hold on. Then "swallow" shifts the metaphor again. To swallow something can mean to accept it, as in "swallow your pride," but it also means to get it down your throat. The speaker is choking in both senses: they cannot accept the breakups and cannot get them down.
The voice matters too. "I freaking can't swallow" is casual and slightly exasperated, the register of someone talking to a friend rather than performing for readers. The mild swear-word swap keeps the line honest without turning it into a polished lament. That plain, unguarded tone is what makes the poem feel true.
Its significance lies in this self-awareness. Many poems about heartbreak try to turn pain into beauty. This one admits that sometimes pain refuses, and that the stumbling is itself the truest thing the speaker can offer. It is a poem about failing to write a poem, and it succeeds by failing in public, in four short, hiccuping lines.