Ray Heinrich's "Romance" is ten lines long and contains no punctuation, no capital letters and almost no adjectives. Yet it manages to hold a whole relationship, or the beginning of one, in a single café scene. A woman burns herself with a cigarette. The speaker watches from across the table. He predicts that soon the two of them will swap stories of their suicide attempts. Then comes a sigh, "ah", and the title word returns as the last line: "romance". The poem is about what intimacy looks like between people who recognise pain in each other, and it never raises its voice to say so.
The most telling choice is the line break after "accidentally". The word sits alone, so heavy with its own insistence that we start to doubt it. Then "again" gets a line to itself too. One burn can be an accident, but a repeated one starts to look like a pattern, and the poem lets those two words contradict each other without comment. The speaker doesn't confront her or explain what he suspects. His silence suggests he understands the code. He doesn't say "accident" himself, and he doesn't need to.
The syntax works in a similar way. "and i'm / across the table" breaks off at the point where we expect a verb, such as "sitting" or "watching". The speaker is reduced to a position in space, a person defined by distance. "Coffee between us" adds to this. Coffee is the most ordinary of social props, the thing people order when they want a conversation to feel casual. Here it also reads as a small barrier, a cup-sized gap between two people. The domestic detail makes what follows more unsettling, because nothing in the setting signals danger. The setting suggests politeness, even a date.
Then the poem turns on one word: "soon". It shifts from observation to prediction, and the prediction is chilling in its calm. "We'll compare suicide attempts" uses the future tense the way people talk about plans: we'll swap holiday stories, we'll compare notes. The verb "compare" matters most. It brings in the language of exams, of scars shown off, perhaps even of a faint rivalry over who has gone further. It also quietly reveals something about the speaker. The pronoun "we'll" assumes that he too has attempts to bring to the table. Without announcing it, the poem has told us that both people are wounded, and that this shared knowledge is what draws them together.
Formally the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the rhythm comes from fragmentation. Many lines are only one to three words long ("again", "soon", "ah"), so the poem reads like speech full of pauses, a voice deciding how much to say. Each short line works as a beat of silence. The longer lines, "she burns herself with her cigarette" and "we'll compare suicide attempts", are the only ones that deliver full information, and they land with the flat tone of a news item. The missing punctuation and lowercase "i" add to this. Nothing is emphasised, and the speaker's voice is as small and level as his world has become.
The ending is where readers are likely to disagree. "Ah / romance" can be read as bitter sarcasm: this is what love has shrunk to, two people trading their worst moments over coffee. It can also be read, more uncomfortably, as sincere. If romance is the experience of being truly seen, then being able to tell another person about your lowest point without being met by shock may count as a kind of closeness. The sigh in "ah" can carry either meaning, and the poem never settles it. Repeating the title in the final line makes the word feel like a verdict and a question at once.
What makes the poem significant is this restraint. A subject like self-harm invites melodrama, but "Romance" chooses understatement, and the effect is harder to dismiss. The horror is that none of it looks like horror: a burn, a coffee cup, a calm forecast. By pairing the language of love with the language of despair, the poem asks what we mean by intimacy, and whether tenderness and damage can sit at the same table. It leaves the answer open, which may be why a poem this short stays in the mind so long.