A bunch of cheap flowers goes out of a window, and a list of sixteen things comes back in. That exchange is the whole poem. The title tells us what the speaker did: got rid of the supermarket flowers, the kind of gift that is easy to buy and awkward to keep. The body of the poem shows why it didn't help. You can throw a bouquet out of a window, but you can't throw out Maths class.
The central idea is that when a relationship, or a crush, goes wrong, ordinary life becomes a minefield. Judging by the references to English class, Maths class and peer marking, the speaker's world is a school one, where the two people can't simply stop seeing each other. Nothing on the list is dramatic. Paper, pencils and notes are about as dull as objects get, and that is the point. Everything has been quietly contaminated.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines are short, often a single word, so each item gets its own beat and its own pause, like a thought surfacing and sinking. The phrase "remind me of you" appears only once, in the opening line, and is never repeated. A list that restated it every time would sound mechanical. Here the reader has to carry the phrase down the page, as the speaker must carry the memories.
The order of the list matters. It begins with "Last year", a span of time rather than an object, and moves through the classroom items to "Peer marking" and "Unfunny jokes". The adjective in that last phrase is affectionate. Nobody remembers jokes that weren't funny unless they were fond of the person telling them. Then comes "The little things", the vaguest line, as if the speaker admits that the list can't hold everything. Straight after it, "The number 6" is the opposite: specific and unexplained. It reads like a private code, and the reader is locked out of it.
The poem's centre is "My hand touching yours / Me staring at you". These are the longest lines, and the only ones with both people in them. They are built from participles, "touching" and "staring", rather than finished sentences, so they feel like snapshots frozen mid-moment. Then the poem drops straight back to "Maths class", as if the memory were too much to dwell on. What follows is a reversal. Staring becomes "Unintentional eye contact", and touching becomes "Trying to avoid each other". The phrase "each other" suggests the distance is mutual, that neither person is simply the one who left. "Asthma" sits between these lines and is the most ambiguous word in the poem. The text doesn't say whose it is or whether it is literal. Its position, though, lets it read as a bodily reaction: the breathlessness of being near someone you can't talk to.
The last line, "Your name", is two words long, and it is the only item that points directly at the person. It is also the one thing that can't be avoided. You can skip a classroom or change seats, but you can't stop hearing a name. The poem never says the name, and it never says "love" or "miss" or "hurt" either. That restraint is its strength. The feeling is carried entirely by accumulation, and the reader has done the emotional arithmetic by the end.
This is why the poem matters. It captures how heartbreak actually behaves: not as one grand statement but as a scatter of small, stubborn triggers. The list form also says something about the speaker. Making a list is an attempt to put things in order and take control. Yet the title is in the past tense, "I Threw", while the poem is in the present, "remind". The action is finished, but the problem is not. By the end, throwing the flowers away looks less like a decision than a gesture the speaker knew wouldn't work.