Jamie Luray's "Getting Through?" is about being the only one in a conversation who seems to be having it. The speaker yells, shouts, pleads and begs, and nothing registers. The title already carries the doubt, since its question mark asks whether communication is possible at all. Nothing in the text says who "you" is, so the accusation could be aimed at a parent, a friend or a partner. That openness lets almost any reader slip into the speaker's place.
The opening verbs build in a rising scale: "yell and shout / And plead and beg." The repeated "And" makes the list feel breathless, as if the speaker is throwing everything she has at a wall. The wall is "your head," and the phrase "gets through" turns the listener's mind into something sealed. Then comes a small paradox: "nothing heard / Nothing said." The speaker has plainly said a great deal, yet words nobody receives count as unspoken. The hyphen that cuts off "said-" works like a door closing, and the sarcasm that follows ("Oh, suddenly you want to hear me now?") breaks into the gap. The listener's attention arrives late and on the wrong terms.
Those terms are the poem's sharpest grievance. When the listener does notice, the speaker is labelled: "Blame an attitude / Or wanting attention." Being ignored is bad enough, but being told you are *seeking* attention turns the cry for help into a character flaw. The speaker's reply, "either way you're mistaken," refuses both labels. The final line, "no one's even paying attention," throws the accusation back. The speaker was never short of attention. The listener was short of paying it.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse in short, plain lines that sound like speech, not composition. Rhyme turns up and then drops away. "Speaking" and "hearing" chime in a near-rhyme, and "tension" and "attention" close the poem with a fuller one. "My words fly by / The dodging eye" is the neatest couplet, and its image carries a lot. Words become thrown objects, and the listener's eye ducks them like a flinching target. Because the rhyme is so tidy, it makes the situation feel more stuck, as though the pattern is closing in.
The rhetorical questions give the poem its rhythm of argument. "What's the point in speaking, / When no one is ever hearing?" is answered at once by the speaker: "None. That's what." The short, flat reply is telling. No one else is going to answer, so the speaker answers herself. The same question comes back in the last two lines, now about "raising the tension." The poem ends where it started, in a loop, which mirrors the "reoccurring loss" it names. That odd spelling of "reoccurring" stresses the repetition, and the loss is a pattern, not a single event.
The middle stretch is the saddest. "My complaints with an easy fix / Cannot be solved / By me." The fix is easy, which is the cruelty of it, but only someone else can apply it. The line break isolates "By me" and leaves the speaker small and powerless. Then comes the image of "the one hand / That'll never reach out towards me." The speaker has moved from noise (yelling, shouting) to touch, from wanting to be heard to wanting to be held onto. Note too that "the one I choose" suggests the listener matters. If this were a stranger, the silence would not hurt so much.
The poem's significance lies in how recognisable it is. It has no dramatic event, only the ordinary pain of talking to someone who is elsewhere, and it shows how that pain can harden into resignation: "There's nothing I can do / But accept." Notice, though, that the poem itself is a kind of last attempt. The listener may not hear, but a reader is listening for as long as the poem lasts. It offers the very thing the speaker is denied.