Forgiveness is usually presented as the end of a quarrel. In "Cheap Shot", Ancient Artifact asks what happens when it isn't: when the right words have been said and the wound keeps talking anyway.
The poem opens with a single quoted line, "Go sell yourself to someone else," set apart like evidence laid on a table. Then comes the speaker's insistence: "i've forgiven you for saying this, i really truly have." That stacked "really truly" sounds like someone persuading themselves as much as the listener. The speaker builds a generous case for the defence. The insult came "in a time of anger and spite," "bubbling out of your throat like vomit." The simile is well chosen, because vomit is involuntary and unplanned, something the body expels and is then ashamed of. The speaker excuses the cruelty by turning it into an accident. "i understand this better than anyone" reads as kindness, but it is worth remembering, because the ending cashes it in.
Then "but" swings the poem round. The words are "branded on my ribs," and the verb matters. Branding is done to livestock and goods, so an insult about selling oneself comes back as a mark of ownership, burned in and permanent. The ribs are the cage around heart and lungs, which places the words exactly where breathing happens. They follow the speaker "everywhere i go," and they are "echoed a hundredfold more than the last second." Each moment is louder than the one before, so the sentence grows instead of fading.
The most striking moment is typographic: "gosellyourself:needypatheticslutimpurevainweakbrokeconceited". With no spaces or capitals, it looks like a thought on a loop, too crowded to breathe in. The colon works like an equals sign. The speaker has translated one sentence into everything it seems to mean. Since the quoted line contains none of those adjectives, the list seems to be what the speaker's own mind has added, an inference but a persuasive one. "Sell yourself" carries a sexual insinuation that explains "slut" and "impure." The other words quarrel with each other, since nobody can be both "needy" and "conceited," or "weak" and "vain." An insult doesn't need to be consistent to stick. "Broke" slides between poor and shattered, extending the poem's language of money.
The third stanza brings the body back, but escalated. Vomit has become words "coughed up blood as it floods your lungs." Vomit is embarrassing, but blood is injury, and flooding lungs means drowning. The speaker still pictures the insulter's mouth with some generosity, yet the image has darkened. The words are no longer a lapse but something that hurts the person who says them too.
Then the last lines: "how many people have / i / haunted this way?" The pronoun gets its own line, the smallest word in a poem whose speaker never capitalises "i," and suddenly the speaker is looking at themselves. The question recasts "i understand this better than anyone." Perhaps that understanding comes from having been on the speaking end. The poem moves from complaint to conscience, and by ending on a question it lets neither speaker nor reader off with an answer.
Formally, this is free verse with no rhyme. The long, run-on lines of the first stanza have the tone of someone calmly explaining themselves, and that calm fractures into short lines and white space by the end. Sound does quiet work too. The plosive b's of "bubbling," "bitter" and "branded" and the hissing s's of "spite," "spilled" and "spiteful" make the language itself sound like spitting. The title, "Cheap Shot," picks up the commercial vocabulary of selling, being broke, and price. A cheap shot costs the sayer almost nothing, and the poem tallies what it costs everyone else.
The poem is honest about the gap between forgiving and healing. Forgiveness is a decision, but the ribs remember anyway. The closing question then widens a private hurt into a shared responsibility, since every careless sentence may be lodged in someone else's body.