A boast usually sounds proud, but the one at the centre of Jen Czahur's "What I Do Best" sounds worn out. Twice the speaker claims a talent, first "marching home" and then "waiting", and the swap between the two is the whole poem in miniature. Nothing names a war outright, yet the vocabulary points that way: "dark camps," "mission statements," "bullets," "embankments," "the evil at hand." Judging by this language, the "you" is someone returning from military service, and the speaker is left to work out what that return actually means.
The opening is a question with no question mark: "Where did you go and how did it flow / From dark camps into mission statements". Without punctuation, the sentence runs on like the thing it describes. The contrast inside it is striking. "Camps" suggest raw, bodily experience, while "mission statements" are the smooth, official language of institutions. The question seems to ask how something brutal gets converted into tidy wording, and what happens to a person along the way. The next line adds a pun: "Triggers arrive like bullets fly." The word works both for the psychological triggers that set off memory and for the part of a gun. Because the simile treats an invisible, internal threat as a physical one, peace begins to carry the same danger as combat.
The perspective is slippery. The bullets fly "around my head," so it is the speaker, not the soldier, who feels them. Either the speaker has absorbed the returning person's memories, or the whole household has been drafted into the war. The poem seems unwilling to keep the two people apart. This also explains the oddest line of the opening: "Fires burning from within my chest / Because you have come marching home." The fire is caused by the arrival, not the absence. A long-awaited return, the poem implies, is not simply a relief.
The sound of the poem is built on chains of rhyme. "Chest," "best," "pressed" and "dressed" strike like drum beats, while a second chain ends line after line on "by": "impressed by," "incurred by," "healed by," "standby." The "by" endings are grammatically unfinished, since a preposition is left waiting for its object. That is exactly the condition the poem describes. Elsewhere the echoes are looser, as in "hand" and "land," or "embankments" and "statements," where only the endings chime. The rhythm is free but pulse-like. "Tussle and stare down the evil at hand" almost gallops, and the later lines shrink to clipped fragments. The break between "Waiting for you to come" and "Marching home" holds the arrival back for a beat, which acts out the delay.
The bodily imagery is the most unsettling. "The nightly dance of fingers pressed / Into the flesh that's healed by / All that's dressed and ready" is deliberately ambiguous. "Dance" is a gentle word for something that sounds compulsive, perhaps a habit of pressing on a scar to test it, or a restless night. "Dressed" can mean bandaged and can also mean uniformed and prepared to leave, so the same word covers both injury and readiness. Flesh that is "healed" yet still pressed at night suggests recovery that never feels certain.
The refrain changes at the end. "Yet marching home is what I do best" becomes "Now waiting is what I do best," and the shift from "Yet" to "Now" signals a new realisation. There is also a tension in the tenses: earlier, "you have come marching home," yet by the end the speaker is still "waiting for you to come / Marching home." The person is physically back, but the homecoming that matters has not happened. That is the poem's central idea, that arriving and returning are different things.
Its significance lies in giving voice to the stretch after the arrival, when the parade is over and the quiet work of endurance begins. The "best" skill it names is one nobody would choose, a talent for standing by. The plain diction, informal spelling ("thru") and repeated refrain keep the poem close to speech and song, so that grief arrives in an everyday voice that leaves nothing to hide behind.