Most poems about drinking and smoking are about escape, about dulling pain until it stops. Sarah's "nothing" turns that idea around. Her speaker drinks and smokes to feel more, not less. The central idea sits in the last line, "something instead of nothing", and the whole poem is a short, bleak argument for why someone would hurt themselves a little just to confirm they are still there. All we have is a first name and a title, so it is safest to treat the speaker as a voice on the page rather than guess at a life behind it.
The poem opens with "so", a small word that makes it feel like the middle of a conversation or the end of a long night. Something has already happened, and this is where it has led. The verbs that follow are flat and almost businesslike: "i drink the last bottle of vodka / and smoke that pack of cigarettes." The words "last" and "that" do a lot of quiet work. "The last bottle" suggests supplies running out, a kind of finality. "That pack" sounds offhand, as if it were just lying around. There is no drama in the tone, and that calm is unsettling.
The poem's most important device is repetition. "The burn" appears three times in two lines: "i like the burn / the burn of strong alcohol going down my throat / and the burn of grey cigarette smoke". The repeated phrase works like a pulse, and the speaker lingers on the sensation as if replaying it. The word "like" matters too. This is not confessed with shame or regret but with plain preference. Pain is welcome here because it is at least a signal.
The imagery is built on a contrast between speed and slowness. The vodka burn is immediate, felt "going down my throat". The cigarette damage is gradual: smoke "slowly turning my lungs black". The colour words, "grey" for the smoke and "black" for the lungs, drain the poem of warmth as they go. The speaker also knows about the long-term harm and mentions it without flinching. There is no sense of being tricked by the habit. The poem sounds like someone who understands the cost and has decided the cost is worth paying for a moment of sensation. That makes it more disturbing than if the speaker were naive.
The form follows the same plainness. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The poem is free verse written in lowercase, with no capital "i" and no capital letters opening lines. It reads like a diary entry or a message typed late at night, not a polished performance. The lines swell and then collapse. The fourth and fifth lines are long and breathless, piling up the burning, while the final line is short and blunt. Punctuation fades as well. Earlier lines get full stops, but the last line ends with nothing, so the poem seems to trail off rather than conclude. That missing full stop is an effective choice, because the thought stays open and unresolved.
The final line also has a neat internal balance: "something instead of nothing". The two words sit on either side of "instead of", like the two pans of a scale, and "nothing" gets the last word. Formally, then, the emptiness wins. The poem ends on the very thing the speaker is trying to escape. The title, which appears here in quotation marks, adds to this effect. Set apart like a single spoken word, "nothing" seems to hang over everything, a label for the whole experience.
The poem is worth reading because it names a kind of suffering that is easy to overlook. We usually expect sadness to look like tears or anger, but here the problem is the absence of feeling, a numbness so complete that pain looks like relief. The poem does not glamorise this. Its colours are grey and black, its tone is tired, and its only hope is the small, desperate one of "feeling something." It leaves readers with an uncomfortable question about what it means when someone would rather hurt than feel nothing, and it asks that question without giving easy comfort or an easy answer.