Someone asks a question, and the answer arrives wrapped in a laugh. That small scene is the whole of icvetea's "20 Crying," and it says a good deal by holding most of it back. The question is what the worst kind of crying is. The reply is that it's the kind no one can hear.
The opening stanza is built from bare, clipped sentences: "You come to me. / Ask me. / What the worst of crying." The last line is missing its verb, and it ends with a full stop instead of a question mark. Read aloud, the question sounds flat and slightly broken, as if the asker had trouble getting it out. Whether that is deliberate or not, it suits a poem about things that don't come out smoothly. The repeated "me" at the ends of the first two lines also puts the speaker at the centre of the scene, the person others turn to. Then comes the odd, striking line "I smile with laughter." We normally expect a smile to be a smaller thing than laughter, but here the two are fused, and both are plainly out of place beside the subject of crying. The smile reads less like amusement than like a mask, and the poem never says what it covers. "You wanna know?" has the casual, teasing tone of ordinary speech. It works as a pause before the speaker lets something real slip.
The answer, "That is the silent one," turns our usual idea of crying upside down. Crying is normally loud, with sobs and sound that tell other people you are hurting. Here the worst version is the one that has been shut down. The instructions that follow are physical and almost violent: "hold your breath," "Grab your tears." Tears become something you seize, like a small animal or a child that must be restrained. The phrase "have to" suggests that the person has no choice. The final line of the answer, "To making it keep quiet and safe," is grammatically awkward, and the slip is revealing. "It" is singular while "tears" is plural, so "it" seems to stand for the whole feeling rather than just the water. Pairing "quiet" with "safe" implies that being heard would be dangerous. Judging by the wording, silence here is protection as much as pain.
The form behaves the way the content describes. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just short, end-stopped lines, nearly every one closed by a full stop. Those repeated stops feel like held breath, a line starting, catching and halting again. The pronouns also shift. The speaker begins with "I" (the smile, the laughter), but the explanation slides into a general "you": "Where you have to hold your breath." That move turns private experience into something universal, and it quietly draws the questioner, and the reader, into the same position. The number in the title is hard to read. It could mark a place in a sequence or something else entirely, and the poem itself gives no way to tell.
The ending is the most important move. After describing the hidden kind of crying, the speaker hands the question back: "So what about you?" The poem began with "you" asking and ends with "you" being asked, and no answer is written down. The silence after that line mirrors the silence it describes. We are left to wonder who has been asking, and also who has been hiding behind a smile, perhaps even the speaker, who laughed while giving the answer.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is that it shows rather than explains. The speaker never says "I hide my pain." The laugh, the held breath and the grabbed tears make the point for her. It also says something true about how we treat each other. The people who look fine, who smile and answer questions lightly, may be the ones doing the hardest, quietest work of staying composed. In fewer than a dozen short lines, the poem asks us to listen more carefully for what is not being said.