A poem called "First Love" might be expected to begin with a person. Jen Czahur begins with weather. Her opening line, "Like something new in the world today," is a simile with nothing on its other side. It never says what is like something new. That gap is the point: a feeling this fresh has no ready comparison, so the speaker can only reach for light and water, "a prism of color" and "rain water dancing on the roof of my car." The detail of the car matters too. The speaker watches from inside a shelter, close to the beauty but not yet in it.
The poem's most memorable passage comes next. Girls play "in the mud / That once was sand / That once was ocean / That once was life." The three repeated "that once was" lines read like a chain of loss, each link pointing back to something larger than the one before. The children are happy in what is left over from something vast. Whether we hear this as the story of life's beginnings or as a slow decline, delight and ruin share one image. The speaker's reaction is a broken sentence: "And my God –". The dash cuts her off, as if the thought is too big to finish.
After that the poem turns inward, and its language gets cautious. She is "stopping myself from wanting / What is probably natural." The word "probably" is telling. She doesn't trust even her own instincts enough to call desire natural without a hedge. The parenthesis "(Replace the ones that I love)" arrives like a whispered aside, and the poem never explains it. It could be a confession, an instruction, or the very thing she is trying not to want. The ambiguity is unsettling, and the poem lets it stand. A few lines later she is "almost certain there's truth / In this misery," another hedge. She is trying to believe that her pain means something, without quite managing it.
Then the vocabulary changes. After rain, prisms and oceans, we get "Can't find the off button," a phrase from machines and remote controls. The comparison shows the speaker's frustration: nature carries on by itself, but an emotion can't be switched off the way a device can. The image also sits oddly beside the opening. The poem starts by marveling at the world and ends up wishing it could power down.
The form supports this unsteadiness. There is no regular meter and no rhyme scheme, only short lines with almost no punctuation, so the reader decides where to breathe. The few marks that do appear are interruptions: a dash, a parenthesis, and finally question marks. There is one faint echo, since "today" in the first line is answered much later by "go away." It may be accidental, but it quietly links the wonder of the opening to the wish to escape it.
The last four lines make the biggest shift. The poem has been describing and confessing, and now it speaks to a "you" for the first time. The poem never says who this is, though the title suggests a beloved. "What would you say if I kissed you?" comes right before "If I disappeared and never returned?", so desire and vanishing sit side by side as two possible outcomes of one impulse. The repeated "Would you" questions then shrink the stakes in a revealing way. The speaker moves from asking for a kiss to asking, "Would you speak of me kindly? / Would you remember my name?" Being remembered, it seems, matters more to her than being loved.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It doesn't treat first love as simple sweetness. It shows love arriving as wonder and fear together, and it connects the intensity of wanting with the fear of being forgotten. The mud passage gives that fear a physical form: everything, even an ocean, becomes something smaller. The poem ends on a question and leaves it unanswered, so we are left hearing the speaker wait.