Some feelings reach the body before the mind has agreed to them. Mafalda's "Shivers" is built around that gap: eight short lines, no punctuation, and a speaker who cannot decide whether a physical reaction is a gift or a betrayal.
The first stanza is in the present tense, and it is evasive. "Just thinking about it": what is "it"? The poem never says. The second stanza hints at an answer, but here the word is left blank, as if the speaker can't bring themselves to name it. Then comes "It reflects something / Just maybe not what I want." The verb "reflects" turns the shivers into a mirror, with the body reporting back a truth the speaker hasn't asked for. Even the wording is hedged: "something" is vague, and "Just maybe" backs away from its own claim. The word "just" appears twice in four lines, and each time it shrinks the feeling down. Yet "just thinking" actually does the opposite. If thought alone is enough to set off the body, the feeling is powerful.
The oddest phrase is "Shivers do down my spine", where idiom would give us "go". It may be a slip, but read as written it has a curious effect. "Do" makes the shivers act on their own, something that happens to the speaker rather than something the speaker does.
The word "shivers" is also doing double duty. We shiver from cold, fear and disgust, and we shiver from a thrill. Stanza one gives no clue which kind this is, so a reader might assume dread. The second stanza reveals the truth only after a turn: "But I liked the shivers." That "But" is the poem's hinge. It also moves us into the past tense and brings in "you" for the first time, so the feeling now has a person and a moment attached.
Then comes the repeated "At least": "At least that time you kissed me / At least that day." The repetition sounds like bargaining, someone gathering evidence in their own defence. The phrase also suggests, though the poem never confirms it, that whatever surrounds this memory was less happy, and the kiss is the one thing worth salvaging. Notice how the memory narrows from "that time" to "that day", as if the speaker is zooming in on the one spot they can still stand to look at.
The line lengths follow this movement. "At least that day" is the shortest line in the poem, at four syllables, and it is followed straight away by the longest: "And I hated that I liked them." The short line holds its breath and the long one lets it out as a confession. The grammar of that last line is also revealing. "Liked" is tucked inside "hated", so the pleasure is literally enclosed by the self-disapproval. The two verbs are not evenly matched either. The speaker says "liked", a modest, almost shy word, but "hated", a strong one. The pleasure is understated and the shame is not. The poem then ends on "them", so the last word is the shivers themselves, back where the poem began.
There is no rhyme, and the plain, mostly one-syllable words sound like speech rather than song. That suits the subject. Rhyme would click the poem shut, and nothing here is settled. The lack of punctuation lets the lines run into one another, so the speaker never gets a full stop to rest on.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a very ordinary contradiction. Wanting something and approving of the wanting are not the same, and the body often votes before the mind does. Mafalda doesn't tell us whether the kiss was a mistake, who "you" is, or what the speaker should do. The poem stays inside the moment of conflict, and its small, plain scale makes the confession feel believable rather than staged.