Four short lines, two speakers, and one laugh that doesn't count. "Laugh" is built like a miniature scene from a play, and its drama sits in the gap between hearing a sound and believing in it.
The situation is simple. A woman asks how long it has been since she last laughed. The man answers with a question meant as reassurance: didn't you laugh yesterday? Instead of arguing, she demonstrates: *laughs*. Then comes the last line, "-no." The central idea is that laughter can be produced on demand and still be missing. She can make the sound, but the feeling behind it is gone, and the poem never names the sadness. It lets a single refusal stand in for it.
The language is slightly off-balance, and that is part of its effect. "How long haven't I laughed anymore...?" tangles a negative, a time question and an "anymore" into one knot, where a smoother sentence would be "How long has it been since I laughed?" The ellipsis before the question mark lets the voice trail off, as if she is half asking him and half asking herself. His reply, "Didn't you did yesterday?", stumbles too. Whether the slips are deliberate or not, they make the exchange sound overheard rather than composed, with two people talking unguardedly instead of performing.
The two speakers also measure time differently. She asks "how long," a stretch of weeks or months, a feeling of distance. He answers with "yesterday," a single point on the calendar. "Anymore" quietly admits that laughing was once ordinary for her, which is why its absence hurts. His question is also a leading one: "Didn't you...?" expects the answer yes. He is trying to steer her toward agreement, and the mismatch shows how two people can talk to each other without meeting.
Then the stage direction. The asterisks around *laughs* look like the convention of scripts or online messages, and the poem uses it well. Sound can't be printed, so the laugh is reduced to a label, a thing she hands over like evidence. The reader never hears it and is told only that it happened, which is exactly how hollow it is.
The final line is the most interesting. "-no" has a dash instead of a speaker tag, a lowercase letter and no full stop, so we cannot be sure who is speaking or what is being refused. It could be her answer to his question: no, I didn't laugh yesterday. In English, "no" to a negative question is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the trap he has set. It could also be her verdict on the laugh she has just given: no, that wasn't one. It could even be a retraction of the whole attempt. The dash works like a breath taken before backing away.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The rhythm comes from shrinking. The first line is long and winding, his reply is shorter, the laugh is a single action, and the poem ends on one syllable. It fades the way a laugh does when nobody is really joining in, and the closing "no" lands as a door shutting quietly.
Above it all sits the heading "Broken Princess," whether a name, a persona or a series title. A princess belongs to stories where happiness is built in, so "broken" is a blunt word to attach to her. The dialogue never describes any breakage, no tears and no cause. It shows only one small symptom and trusts the title to tell us how serious it is.
That restraint is what makes the poem significant. It gives us the same evidence the man has, a laugh we can see, and then tells us it isn't real. In doing so it puts us in his position, and it suggests that "but you were fine yesterday" is one of the least helpful things to say to someone who is not.