Three short lines, and a whole small room appears: a tub, a girl, a light that can't quite make up its mind. Nothing else is given. We aren't told the time of day, why she is there, or what she feels. The only name attached to the poem is "soda", and the text tells us nothing more about who that is, so the poem has to stand on its own. For something this spare, that is no hardship.
On the surface almost nothing happens. The light flickers, and the girl flickers back. But the last line hides a double meaning. To "flicker back" can mean to return, to come back into view after the light has dipped. It can also mean to answer, to flicker in reply, as if she were speaking the light's language. The first reading makes her something that vanishes and reappears. The second makes her responsive, even playful. The poem never chooses between them, and the central idea lives in that gap. She seems to be only as steady as the light she is seen by, or perhaps she is so alone that the one thing in the room answering her is a faulty bulb. Both readings are inferences, and the text supports either.
The construction does a lot with very little. The first line, "Girl in the bathtub.", has no verb and no article. Not "A girl" or "The girl", just "Girl". It reads like a caption under a photograph or a note in a stage direction, and it makes her a figure rather than a character. Verbs arrive only in the next two lines, and they are the same verb. "Flickers" is used first for the light and then for the girl, so the grammar quietly puts them on equal footing. There is no end-rhyme, but the repeated word does a rhyme's job by tying the lines together and making the last one feel like an echo.
The rhythm is just as tight. Counted out, the lines run five syllables, then seven, then five, the old haiku shape. Whether or not that was deliberate, it gives the poem the feel of a held breath: short, longer, short. The long middle line carries the loose, drifting phrase "from time to time". That phrase suggests irregular intervals, with no pattern to the flicker, which makes the room feel patient and slightly uneasy. The final line is brisk by comparison. "And she flickers back" snaps shut on the hard consonant of "back", the way a switch clicks.
Sound supports the image throughout. "Light" and "time" share a long vowel, and "time to time" doubles back on itself like a pulse. "Flickers" is made of clipped, tiny sounds, short i and sharp k, which sound like what they describe. The small word "And" at the start of line three also matters. It makes her response feel automatic, a cause followed by its effect, as though she couldn't help answering.
The title, "flickering back", is in the present participle, a form that never finishes. The poem's lines are in the simple present, a state of affairs, but the title suggests an action still going on. It also gives away the poem's last words in advance, so the ending loops back to the beginning. Even the lowercase letters, matching the lowercase "soda", give the whole thing a hushed, informal tone.
The setting adds to this. A bathtub is private and enclosed, the sort of place where people drop their guard. Light and water together can make a reader faintly uneasy, though the poem says nothing of danger. The speaker is also strangely absent. There is no "I", only a camera-like gaze that sees her when the light allows and loses her when it dips, so the flicker may belong as much to the watcher's view as to the room.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of the reader for so few words. A single repeated verb stretches into a question about presence and absence, about whether she is fading or playing along. Is she vanishing, or just answering? The poem declines to say, and we keep thinking about it after the light has steadied.