Seven is the number everything here hangs on. It sits in the subtitle, then opens four lines in a row: "It's been 7 years." The speaker is counting, the way people count after something they have not been able to put down. The poem never says what happened. Judging by the final lines, though, with a "he" who touched, looked and was present, it deals with some kind of violation by another person, and with the long work of getting free of its aftermath. The central idea is that recovery can feel like becoming a different person, someone the harm can no longer reach.
The repeated opening is the poem's main structural device, and it works almost like a staircase. Each "It's been 7 years" is followed by something more complicated. First comes memory ("I still remember it from time to time"). Then fear ("I still live with the fear that this feeling will come back"). Then relief, in the flattest possible words: "it hasn't, I'm okay." There is no exclamation mark and no triumph, only a short sentence that sounds half-convinced. "Still" appears twice, and it shows that the past has not simply vanished. The "I'm okay" is believable because it is so modest.
Then comes the poem's central image, the long line about cells. The idea that the body renews every cell every seven years is a popular belief, and real biology is messier, since not every part of us is replaced on that schedule. For the poem, though, the science matters less than the comfort. The speaker borrows it as a private myth, and it makes the body a place where change can be literal rather than only emotional. The line has an interesting wrinkle, though. The new cells "continue the circle of the previous one," so they inherit the old pattern as well as replacing it. Even while the speaker is claiming a clean break, the grammar admits continuity. That makes the claim feel honest rather than too neat.
The next line gives the number a second meaning: "I am 21 years old," which is three times seven. Subtracting the seven years gives a starting point of fourteen. That is only arithmetic, and the poem does not say it, but the sum is hard to ignore. The birthday also turns the biological cycle into a ritual: "this year on my birthday I changed." The verb is plain and past tense, with no explanation, as if the speaker simply woke up different.
The final three lines are the poem's turn, and they are set apart in a stanza of their own. The long, breathless, prose-like sentences give way to a chant: "I have a body…", "I have a new body…", "I have a body…". Look at how "he" appears. He is never the subject of a positive action, only of negations: "has never touched," "will never feel his gaze," "will never feel the presence of again." The body, meanwhile, is possessed with the plain verb "have." The grammar enacts the claim, with the speaker as owner and he reduced to an absence.
There is also a progression across those three lines, from touch to gaze to mere presence. The harm shrinks, in a sense, from physical contact to being looked at to being near, as though the speaker is listing everything that once felt threatening and crossing it off. The last line is the only one with "again," which quietly admits that the old body did feel his presence. The poem ends on this admission rather than on a victory.
Formally, the text is free verse with no rhyme and almost no ornament. Its rhythm comes from repetition and from the contrast between long and short lines, and the odd capital in "In my body" and the casual numerals read like a message typed fast and left unpolished. The title, "Goddamnit Helen," is a puzzle. It sounds like an exasperated address to someone, perhaps a friend, perhaps the speaker herself, but the poem never explains it. The rough, spoken tone of the title fits the poem's refusal to dress up pain in grand language.
That is what makes it worth reading. It does not dramatize the injury, and it does not pretend the healing is complete. It gives a small, believable portrait of someone seven years on, still wary, finally okay, and sure of one thing: the body is hers.