The most slippery word in Bremarie Gulfan's "Breathe" is the one it begins and ends with. "Okay" can mean yes, fine, I agree, I won't make a scene, and in these few lines it carries several of those meanings at once. At the start it sits in quotation marks, as if the speaker is answering someone. At the end it returns as "I'm okay," without quotation marks, and sounds less like something said to another person than a verdict the speaker hands to themselves. Everything between the two is the evidence that makes the second one hard to believe.
That is the poem's central idea: the gap between what we say and what we feel, and the effort of talking yourself out of needing someone. The second line, "Thought I wanted attentions," is deliberately unclear. The missing "I" and the past tense allow two readings. Either the speaker has decided they never needed these things, or they are admitting, through gritted teeth, that they did. The poem never says what has happened, whether a relationship has ended or only cooled. We get one side of it, with no explanation, which is much of its force.
Then comes the list, eight lines each opening with "Your": time, cuddles, hugs, calls, voices, texts, words, "I love you." The repetition builds like a pulse, and the order seems to matter. It starts with "time," the most abstract gift, moves through bodily closeness ("cuddles," "hugs"), and slides into the things that cross a distance ("calls," "voices," "texts," "words"). Judging by the sequence, presence gradually turns into absence, with the person moving from the room onto a screen. The last item breaks the grammar. "Your I love you" squeezes a whole sentence into a noun, a thing that can be owned, handed over, and lost. Even the word "attentions" bends the language. In everyday English attention is uncountable, but the plural turns it into a pile of separate tokens, each hug and message a coin the speaker has kept count of. Whether or not the plural was a deliberate choice, it suits a speaker who remembers the details so exactly.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines are almost all one to three words long. Its imagery is not metaphorical at all, only plain, concrete nouns, and "texts" and "calls" place it firmly in the present day. This flatness is itself a tactic. The speaker uses the plainest words available, the way people speak when they are holding themselves together. Sound adds a quieter effect. The plural endings of "hugs, calls, voices, texts, words" leave a soft hiss at the end of line after line, almost like a slow exhale.
That brings us back to the title. "BREATHE" is an instruction, and in capitals it looks like a note to self. The word never appears in the body, but the shape of the poem acts it out. The list is the long, shaky inhale, then comes the white space of the stanza break, then the single exhaled line, "I'm okay." The imbalance is the sharpest feature of all. Eight lines of wanting face one line of denial, and the poem's arithmetic argues against its speaker. Nobody lists so lovingly what they claim not to miss.
The poem matters because it is so recognisable. Almost everyone has said "I'm fine" while feeling the opposite, and Gulfan shows how that sentence works by surrounding it with what it hides. It also suggests that love is made of small, ordinary things such as a call, a message or a few minutes of someone's time, rather than grand gestures. For a student reader, it shows how much a poem can do with so little: repetition, line breaks, blank space, and one common word placed twice, so that the second time it means something different.