"Wherever," "whatever," "whenever": Esther Koryian's poem shuts every exit before we know what is wrong. These three sweeping openers leave no place, no activity and no hour in which "you" is absent. The verbs matter too. The speaker *sees* this person, then *meets* them, then *finds* them, and the last verb lands in the one spot that should be safe: "Whenever I'm home, I find you." The poem never says who "you" is. It could be a lover, an ex, a memory or something closer to a haunting. Judging by the text alone, that vagueness is deliberate. We get the pressure of someone's presence, not the story behind it.
The first stanza makes its sound do the trapping. Every line ends on the same "oo": *you, you, two, to, do, you*. The speaker can no more escape that rhyme than the person. Then comes "I can't breathe for us two," the poem's only bodily image. It is ambiguous in a useful way. She may be suffocated by the pair of them, or there may simply be no air for two. The stanza ends in helplessness, with "I do not want to / But what can I do?" The question echoes the earlier "Whatever I do," so the speaker who began by listing what she does ends by asking what is left to do.
The second stanza changes gear. The lines tighten to about five syllables each, and the rhymes come in quick couplets: *crazy/lazy*, *happy/pretty*, *me/free*. It sounds like a chant, or a list of qualifications. The modal verbs do the work of a changing mood: "might," "shall," "must," "can." Possibility hardens into obligation, so that "I must be happy" sounds less like joy than like a duty, a performance. She runs through her flaws, "crazy" and "lazy," the way a person might confess the worst before anyone else can say it. Then comes the offer, "If you look at me / I'll set you free." Here the roles reverse. The haunted one becomes the liberator, and for the first time she asks to be seen instead of doing all the seeing. The grammar shows it. In stanza one, "you" sat at the end of the lines, and now "me" and "free" hold the rhyming position.
The final stanza is the most daring. It works like a chain: *dangerous* gives way to *dangerously*, *close* to *closing*, *doors* to *doors*. Each line picks up the last word of the one before, like links, or like doors shutting one after another. The pun on "close" is the center of the poem. "Dangerously close" means too near, while "closing doors" means shut. One word holds both nearness and closure, and that explains the whole situation. The nearness that smothered her in stanza one and the distance she fears now are the same thing seen from two sides. "Doors and distance" names what is left when closeness fails. The stanza has five lines where the others had six, and "you" vanishes completely. Only "I" and "me" remain, with the doors.
Only the last line is a direct command, and it is also the title: "Give me a chance." It rhymes with "distance," but only loosely. There is no satisfying click, which suits a plea that has not been granted.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to settle who is the victim and who is the threat. "I am dangerous" is stated flatly. It might be a warning, a confession or an invitation, and the poem does not say which. There is almost no decoration, just plain words, short lines and a few repeated sounds. Yet in three stanzas it moves from obsession to self-advertisement to plea. For a student, it shows how much a poem can do with repetition, a pattern of rhyme and one well-chosen pun, without needing elaborate imagery.