In Logan Brosemer's "Letting go," pain begins as something the speaker tries to cut out of himself and ends as something he releases with words. The distance between "I try to cut it out" and "I let her go" is the spine of the poem. In both moments he wants the ache in his chest gone, and what changes is the method. Most of the poem is the story of how he finds the second one.
There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The poem is free verse built from short, plain lines, and that plainness suits what it carries. The opening three lines state a crisis with no decoration, and the flatness makes them harder to read, not easier. The rhythm follows the speaker's state of mind. The recovery stanza moves in gentle, even clauses ("Listening to the others like me, / Helping when I could"). When the outside world returns, the lines pile up: "The flashing lights, / The constant updates from social media, / Bombarded with information." Each line starts with the same kind of noun phrase and arrives like another notification. The stanza's last line, "Mostly about her," is short and lands like a bruise.
The word choices tell their own story. In the hospital stanza the speaker calls other patients "the insane," a harsh word that sounds like someone who still holds the stigma himself. Two lines later they have become "the others like me." That small shift, from a label to a shared identity, is the first real sign of healing, and it is reinforced by "Helping when I could." He begins to recover by being useful to someone else.
The poem is honest about how fragile that recovery is. "I was better but not great yet. / Stable but barely, / One comment or picture away from a breakdown." The image of the mind as a trap is telling, because it makes the speaker's own thoughts the enemy, something "setting" snares for him. Social media becomes the bait. The specific number in "10 days of peace and it was back" matters too. He has been counting, and the precision makes the relapse feel earned and cruel, not vague.
The turning point is the poem's quietest passage: "I talked, / She listened, / And I let her go...." Three short lines, three verbs, and almost no adjectives. The grammar is balanced, giving each person an action, and that fairness mirrors the decision itself. The trailing ellipsis refuses to make the moment grand. After it come two lines built on reversal: "Holding on was killing me, / Fighting for her was just hurting her." Love here is measured by what it does to the other person, and the speaker concludes that clinging has become harm. The pairing "Her heart and trust were broken, / My heart and mind were shattered" is careful too. Hers is damaged, his is smashed, and he admits his mind is involved as well as his heart.
The ending is where the poem is most mature. He leaves a door open ("if with time she decides her happiness did lie with me") but speaks of it almost administratively: "Then we will deal with it then." He does not promise to wait, and he does not turn hope into a bargain. The word "free" in "free from eachother" answers the earlier image of the trap, so separation is framed as release for both people. The final lines carry no full stop. "For I'll be trying to find mine" ends on "trying," not on arrival, which keeps the recovery unfinished and believable.
The poem's surface is raw and unpolished, with slips in wording and spelling that a revision might smooth, but that roughness suits a voice working through things in real time. Its significance lies in what it refuses to do. It does not romanticize heartbreak or treat self-harm as a symbol. It shows recovery as a pattern of progress and setback, and it names a very current danger: the way a screen can keep an old wound open. Its conclusion is that the most loving act available may be to step away.