Seven short lines, and a gun appears without ever being named. That is the first thing worth noticing in "strand of hair no.2" by lowercased lyn: the violence is built from a body part and a verb. "You grow another arm," the speaker says, and a moment later, "And shoot me." No weapon is described, so we assume the new arm either is one or holds one. The picture is grotesque, closer to a nightmare or a cartoon than to realism, and it turns an ordinary situation, "Whenever we're together," into an ambush.
The poem is about being hurt by someone close to you, but its real subject is how little awareness is involved. "Whenever" makes the harm a habit rather than a single event. The phrase "without even realizing it" comes back almost word for word in the second stanza, "While you don't even realize it," and the repetition feels deliberate. The speaker keeps returning to the other person's obliviousness as if it were the strangest part of the injury. Then comes the last line, a stanza of its own: "Neither do I." It is the poem's turn, and it is deliberately hard to pin down. The speaker has just said "it hurts," so what don't they realize? Perhaps they are also unknowingly wounding the other person. Perhaps they don't realize how often this happens, or why they keep being "together" in the first place. Perhaps the hurt is so ordinary that it only registers afterwards. The poem doesn't choose, and each reading makes the unawareness shared rather than one-sided.
The construction supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the line lengths do the work. The second line, "You grow another arm without even realizing it," is long and trailing, as if the change happens quietly and without effort. Then "And shoot me" drops to three words and lands like the shot itself. The second stanza has the same shape: a longer line of simile, then the flat "And it hurts." Notice too that there is almost no end punctuation. After the opening comma, none of the lines closes with a full stop, so nothing is sealed off or resolved. The poem simply stops, which suits a hurt that is still going on.
The imagery is small but carefully chosen. "Another arm" implies the person already has two ordinary ones, so the extra limb is a kind of mutation, something added without their knowledge. In the second stanza the weapon becomes language: "Your vicious words go right through me like bullets." "Go right through" matters, because a bullet that passes through leaves a wound but nothing to hold onto, no lodged evidence. That fits a harm that the other person never sees. The word "vicious" is the one strong judgment in the poem, and it sits in tension with "without even realizing it." Viciousness usually suggests intent, yet the poem insists on innocence. That gap is where the poem lives: can words be vicious if nobody means them to be? The speaker feels they are, and the pain doesn't depend on intent.
The sound is plain too. "Grow" and "go" echo each other across stanzas, and "You," "shoot" and "through" share a long "oo" that makes the violence feel quick and close. Everything else is conversational: "And it hurts" is about as unadorned as a sentence can be. After the dramatic arm-and-bullet imagery, the bluntness reads as honesty.
The title adds a final layer, though only by inference. "strand of hair" suggests something tiny and shed, easily overlooked, and "no.2" suggests this is one piece in a numbered set. The poem is itself slight, a strand rather than a whole braid. Its small size matches its theme: the damage comes from things small enough to go unnoticed. The lowercase styling of the signature and title gives it a diary-like, unpolished feel, as if the speaker is jotting down something they haven't finished working out.
Its significance lies in this restraint. It makes no accusation and no dramatic exit. It admits that some of the worst hurts come from carelessness, and then, in three words, it refuses to leave the speaker out of the picture.