Betrayal usually gets the headlines in a poem about lies, but "lies" by halle is more interested in a quieter injury: being overlooked. The speaker remembers "the first lie," a phrase that quietly promises there were more. That lie involved a girl she "loathed the most," and the real wound comes next. He touched the other girl "in ways, / that i wanted you to touch me." The poem is about jealousy, but jealousy sharpened by humiliation. She was not only deceived. She was seen as "innocently cute. / nothing more."
The form suits that feeling. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just short lines and plain speech, closer to a diary entry than a performance. The lowercase "i" and the missing capitals at the start of lines give a confessional, unpolished voice, though that is an impression rather than a certainty. The spacing does real work. A stray comma and an indented line break leave "ways," dangling before "that i wanted you to touch me." The vagueness of "ways" is telling. She never says what happened, as if the details are too painful or too private to spell out. Her imagination fills the gap.
The most striking structural choice is the isolated line "nothing more." Standing alone with white space on both sides, it is flat and final, the way a dismissal feels. The line before it, "yet you saw me as innocently cute," carries its own sting. "Innocently" sounds like a compliment, but here it means he put her in a category of someone not to be desired. Being called cute is what she is left with in place of being wanted.
Then the poem turns, and the speaker takes control. Notice how the voices are handled. His apology is only reported ("after you pleaded saying you regretted it"), while her reply is the only direct quotation in the poem: "if you want to even touch me, / sanitize your whole body." He is summarized and she is quoted, so the poem gives her the last word on the memory. The word "even" lowers the bar and makes his touch a privilege he must now earn. "Sanitize" is a cold, clinical word from the language of hospitals and hand gel. She turns the man she wanted into something contaminated, and the other girl into the contaminant. It is an ugly, funny, and hurt-filled image all at once.
The repeated word "touch" holds the poem together. It appears five times, in the forms "touched," "touch," "touch," "touch" and "touching," and each time it pairs "her" with "me." Early on, the pairing marks a gap: she touched her, and the speaker wanted to be touched. By the end the same grammar returns, but the wish has curdled. In the final lines, "i dislike the thought of the hands you used to touch her, / touching me," the poem finally lets her be touched, but only in imagination, and only as a source of revulsion. What she once craved now repels her, and the closing "me" lands where the earlier longing was.
Two small shifts are worth noticing. First, the tense moves from the past of "i remember" to the present of "i dislike," so the feeling has not stayed in the past. Second, "dislike" is a surprisingly mild word after "loathed." It might be restraint, or the calm that follows a decision, or an understatement meant to hide how much still stings. The poem leaves that open.
What makes "lies" worth reading is its honesty about mixed feelings. It does not pretend that anger and desire cancel each other out. The speaker can want to be touched and recoil from the same hands, and she can be wounded and in command at once. In a few lines and almost no ornament, the poem captures a very familiar emotional situation: finding out you were not chosen, and answering with a rule of your own.