Almost everything in dee's "After All" reads as a love poem, until the last two words ask us to take it back. The speaker wakes from "the sweetest dream" about someone, lingers over the details, and defends the happiness it leaves behind. Then a doubt arrives: "maybe you were a nightmare / After all." The central idea is that longing and memory are unreliable. The speaker cannot tell whether the person was a gift or a wound, or whether the happiest moments happened at all.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat, and its most striking feature is how it sits on the page. Lines are pushed far to the right and then dropped back to the margin, so the text drifts like a half-remembered dream. "Yesterday" is stranded at the end of a stretched-out line, and "the one" and "that first starts as a twitch" step across the page in a staircase. The reader's eye has to travel the way the speaker's thoughts do. The date in the heading, June 30th, 2013, adds to the diary-like feel, as if the poem were written close to the feeling it describes.
The imagery begins with physical, almost shy detail: "strong muscles / beneath your smooth skin," and above all the "crooked smile" that "starts as a twitch / of the corners of your lips" and ends in a "comical expression." The slow, exact description of a smile shows the speaker has studied this face closely. The word "comical" is affectionate rather than glamorous, which makes the memory feel lived-in rather than idealized.
The butterflies are the poem's main image. "Butterflies in the stomach" is a well-worn phrase, but dee extends it until it becomes strange. These butterflies "rummage around," like someone hunting through a drawer, "searching for some ounce of an opening." The speaker's response, "But I refuse," is the only firm declaration in the poem. She will not let the feeling out, but she will not drive it off either: "the butterflies can stay / and flutter all day." The speaker calls them "a symbol that something is right / in a world where things / can go so / Wrong." Here the line breaks do the work. The sentence stumbles down the page, and "Wrong" lands alone, capitalized, as if the fall it describes had already begun. Capital letters are used selectively throughout. The speaker is a lowercase "i" for most of the poem, then a capital "I" at the moment of refusal, so the grammar itself seems to gain confidence for a line.
The repeated "they are a symbol" works almost like a chant, and the second time it points somewhere new: "of the time we spent / kissing under the cherry blossoms / in the middle of the day." The image is lovely and fragile, since blossoms are a classic emblem of beauty that doesn't last. The scene is also cut off from the rest of the poem. It sits in the past tense, while the opening dream was "Yesterday," and the poem never says whether the kiss was real or dreamed.
That blur is what the parenthetical "(or was it all just a dream)" lets in. It has no question mark and sits in brackets, like a thought slipping in uninvited. The next line makes this explicit: "a reoccurring thought plants itself into my brain." The verb "plants" is a quiet echo of the blossoms, as though the doubt were a seed sown beside the happy memory and now growing. Judging by the text, the doubt has come before and keeps returning.
The final line turns the poem around. The title, "After All," appears only at the very end, so it works as both an afterthought and a verdict. "Nightmare" is left unexplained. The poem does not say whether the person hurt the speaker, left, or was never real, and that silence is part of its force. The sweetness and the dread are made of the same material, the same butterflies that "can go so / Wrong."
The poem is not a grand statement, and its strength is modest, but it is real. It captures a very familiar experience, waking up unsure what to feel about someone, and it lets the form carry that uncertainty, with its drifting margins, fenced-off parenthesis and last-line reversal. The reader leaves with the same question the speaker has, and no way to settle it.