Anger is the title, but the poem keeps circling something else: tears. The speaker describes a body in revolt, crying, pounding tables, tearing at hair, and then reveals that the real struggle is to stop the crying. Anger here is the visible noise. The thing that has been trained out of the speaker is grief, or simply the permission to feel it.
The opening is oddly clinical. "I did multiple things at once / as if i fluctuated between emotions" sounds like a report by someone watching from outside. "Fluctuated" is a cool, almost scientific word, and it sits uneasily beside the raw scenes that follow. That distance may be a coping strategy, or a sign that the speaker has learned to describe feelings without being inside them. After this, the poem becomes physical and concrete: tears "poured," fists "pounded," a scalp is pulled. The repeated p-sounds make the lines feel like blows, and "anything hard and sturdy" shows how badly the speaker needs a surface that won't give way. The aftermath is the quiet, lingering "until my fists ached."
The third stanza holds the poem's most unsettling admission: "i can't tell if it was to stop hitting / or to hurt myself more." The speaker can't separate self-control from self-punishment. Pulling one's own hair might be a way to stop one kind of violence, or just another kind. The odd phrase "fist fills of my hair," instead of the usual "fistfuls," echoes the fists of the previous stanza, so the hands that pound the table are the same hands that turn on the speaker's own head. Anger has nowhere to go but inward.
The car scene shifts the poem from private outburst to a controlled performance. The speaker pounds the door, then "raised my head to hold my tears," a lovely, painful image, as if tilting the face upward could keep the water inside. The speaker is "waiting for my dad to get out," and the poem implies the tears must be kept from him until he is gone. Then the tense slips: "counting how long until i can just cry." After a stanza in the past tense, "can" arrives in the present, as though the waiting is not finished. The small word "just" is heartbreaking, because crying is described as a mere relief that has to be earned by hiding.
Only then does the poem explain where the rule comes from. "He taught me not how to deal with my anger" can be read two ways. He taught the speaker nothing about it, or he taught the speaker *not* to deal with it. Both readings fit. What the father did teach is delivered in quotation marks and shouted: "don't cry," "don't let people see you cry." The speaker's gloss is bitter and deflating: "don't let people see you're human basically." That casual "basically" flattens a whole philosophy into a shrug, and it shows the speaker has already seen through it.
The final stanza turns to a question aimed at any parent: "how can you tell your own child that / that crying makes you weak / that it makes you human." The stumbling repetition of "that" feels like disbelief catching in the throat. The two clauses sit side by side as if they were the same claim, which is exactly the logic the poem challenges, since to the father weakness and humanity are one thing. The last line, "so i did what i was told...", ends on an ellipsis rather than a full stop. The speaker obeyed, and the trailing dots suggest the obedience has no clear ending.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, written entirely in lowercase with almost no punctuation, and the short, plain sentences read like speech. There are no exclamation marks, even in the scenes of violence, so the style itself stays restrained. The only shouting appears in the father's quoted words.
The poem matters because it shows how an emotional rule is handed down, and what it costs the person who follows it. It doesn't argue the point. It shows a child trying to be obedient while their body keeps betraying them, and it lets the reader see that the "don't cry" lesson produces more pain, not less. In that sense the poem is itself a small act of disobedience: the speaker finally lets the feeling be seen.