Three times in nine lines, the speaker of Jade Bagnall's untitled poem reaches for the word "never": "Never again will I let you in," "you were never there," "you'll never have to be mine." It is the vocabulary of a slammed door. But the poem is more interesting than that, because by the last line the speaker sounds less like someone who walked away than someone who has been left, and is working hard to sound unbothered.
The situation is a break-up, or the aftermath of one, addressed directly to a person who lied. The accusation arrives in the first two lines: "the words and lines that you spin." "Lines" is a clever double meaning, since it can mean smooth chat-up lines, lies, or the lines of a poem. The other person's talk is made into something manufactured, and "twisting till everything broke" shows the damage it did. The central idea is that anger can be a form of armour. The speaker insists on strength while quietly showing what it cost her to need it.
The imagery turns on a contrast between sweetness and poison. "Spin" and "twisting" suggest a spider's web or twisted thread, but the animal that finally appears is a snake: "Little snake." Both are creatures that trap and wait, so the shift keeps the sense of a predator without needing a tidy comparison. "Honey" does double duty. It is a sarcastic pet name ("Let's be honest honey"), and it is also the taste the line goes on to describe: "It doesn't matter how sweet you taste, venom works in all the same ways." Charm and harm come from the same source, and the speaker refuses to be fooled by the first. "Little" is just as pointed. It shrinks the person who once seemed powerful into something small and slithering.
The sound of the poem feels like speech more than formal verse. There is no steady metre, and the lines swell in the middle, with the long, breathless sixth and seventh lines, before tightening again. Rhyme appears in bursts rather than a fixed scheme. "Spoke" lands on "broke," "care" echoes "there," and "fine" chimes with "mine." The odd dash in "–you spoke" makes the second line stumble, as if the other person's voice has barged into the speaker's sentence, though that is an inference from the punctuation. The short line "Twisting till everything broke" snaps shut, so the sentence enacts the breakage it describes. The sarcasm is audible too. "At least once speak the truth" implies a habit of lying, and "Don't be ashamed you can't care" grants permission with mock kindness, since the real accusation sits in the next clause: "it's blatant that you were never there."
The closing couplet, "free" and "me", is where the poem turns. "Little snake, I hope you're happy to be free" sounds like a barbed farewell. Then the last line deflates it: "I guess it was your plan to stay this far away from me." "I guess" is tentative, and "this far away" admits a distance the speaker did not choose. Notice also that "I" appears only at the very beginning and end, while "you" fills the lines between. The speaker is surrounded by the other person's behaviour, and the final word, "me," leaves her alone at the end of the poem, which fits that reading.
The poem's title is just three asterisks, a standard sign of an untitled piece. It is tempting to read that as a feeling too raw or too ordinary to name, though that is a guess. What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a very common emotion. Plenty of break-up writing either wallows or triumphs. Here the triumph is performed in the first lines and gently undone in the last. The result is a portrait of someone trying out the words "never again" and finding, in the final line, that they do not completely settle the matter.