The cruelty of this tiny poem lies in who gets to see. "Everybody but she saw how her words came out": before anything else happens, the reader is placed with the crowd and against the woman. She is the only person in the room who cannot see what is happening, and the poem exists to show us.
What it shows is speech turned into something bodily. Her words don't ring out or cut. They "slipped and oozed out, dribbling off her chin, in thick drops." The poem never tells us what she said. We get no quotation, no argument, no insult. All the attention goes to the manner of the speaking, and that choice is the poem's central idea: harmful speech has a physical, almost repulsive presence for the people who have to witness it, even when the speaker feels nothing of the kind. She may believe she is simply talking. Everyone else watches something spill.
The construction is simple, and the simplicity does a lot of work. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is three sentences, close to prose, and their shapes matter. The first is a flat, plain statement of fact. The second is longer and gathers speed through a run of verbs, "slipped," "oozed," "dribbling," and each is a little more undignified than the one before. "Slipped" suggests something escaping unintentionally. "Oozed" is slower and thicker. "Dribbling" belongs to babies, invalids and the very drunk, and "off her chin" makes the picture embarrassingly specific. Even the sounds cooperate. The soft, slithery sibilants of "slipped" and "oozed" give way to the heavy, clotted "thick drops," where the hard *th* and the final consonants seem to slow the line down until it falls.
The third sentence isn't really a sentence at all: "Like the venom they held." It is a fragment, and it arrives like one last drip after the main clause has finished. It is also the poem's only explicit simile, and it changes the meaning of everything before it. Until this point the image could be merely disgusting, a messy mouth. "Venom" makes it dangerous. Venom is meant to harm, and it belongs to creatures that strike. Yet this venom isn't injected with intent. It dribbles. That tension is the most interesting thing in the poem. She is poisonous and pathetic at once, a threat who is also faintly ridiculous, and the poem doesn't settle which matters more. The past tense of "held" adds to the effect. The words contained the venom all along, and the only new thing is that the drops have become visible.
The grammar of the opening is worth a second look. "Everybody but she" is slightly formal where "but her" would be everyday speech, and the stiffness gives the narrator a cool, observing tone. This is not a voice that shouts. It watches and reports, which may be why the poem feels colder than its subject. We are never told whether the narrator pities her, despises her, or has been hurt by her. The restraint leaves that question with the reader.
The title pulls in a different direction. "Screamy and memey" sounds like internet slang, with those casual *-y* endings that shrink a word into a label. Judging by the wording, it could be the sort of dismissive verdict a crowd passes on a loud person, tidy and mocking. The poem underneath is quiet, slow and sticky. It may be that the title shows how the onlookers flatten her into a joke, while the text shows what they actually see. The «* * *» mark after the title is a conventional break marker, and it may hint that this is a fragment or a pause rather than a complete statement, though the text alone cannot confirm that.
Whatever the intention, the poem's importance is in its economy. In under thirty words it makes an abstract idea, toxic speech and the blindness of the person producing it, into an image no one can unsee. It also hands the reader an uncomfortable role. We are among the "everybody," watching someone who can't watch herself, and we may wonder how many of our own words have been dripping unnoticed.