Drowning is not usually something you do on purpose, and that is the first clue to how typical abigail's "Weapons" works. The opening line, "Seeing you and drowning are about the same," sets up a speaker who is overwhelmed before anything has even happened. No touch, no argument, just sight. The casual "about the same" is telling too. The speaker doesn't dress the feeling up. They state it flatly, like a fact they have given up arguing with.
The second line then changes the picture: "Your love is a weapon but you've used it all wrong." The sentence is conversational, almost a complaint about bad technique, as if love were a tool that someone keeps picking up by the wrong end. The "but" matters. The speaker doesn't deny that this love is powerful, only that it is being aimed badly. That small, plain "all wrong" is where the poem's hurt and its hope both begin.
The middle three lines are the poem's arsenal, and they share a pattern: "The dagger of your love," "The punch of hearts," "The shot of touch." Each begins with a weapon and ends with an abstract noun, so love, hearts and touch are turned into things that can be swung, thrown or fired. The repeated "of" gives these lines a drumbeat, like blows landing one after another. The results are listed just as steadily: scars, bruises, a wounded chest. It is also worth noticing the verbs. The first two weapons "have made" their marks, which suggests damage already done, while the last one "wounds" in the present tense. Scars are old, bruises are fresher, and a wound is still open. Judging by this sequence, the pain is not fading but arriving in the present, and the closer the poem gets to the speaker, the more it hurts. The weapons also move through different kinds of harm, from the dagger's close cut to the punch to the shot, so there seems to be no safe distance from this person. "Shot" can even suggest an injection or a drink, which adds a hint of something intoxicating mixed into the violence. That ambiguity is a quiet way of showing that the speaker's pain and attraction are tangled together.
There is no regular rhyme here, and no punctuation at all. The six lines run at roughly the same length without settling into a fixed meter, so the poem sounds like speech that has been tightened rather than a formal verse. The lack of full stops lets the lines slide into each other, which suits a speaker who is drowning. The hard consonants in "dagger," "punch," "shot" and "scars" give the middle section a clipped, percussive feel, in contrast to the open, watery first line.
Then comes the surprise of the last line: "Leave your weapons unhinged and just love me." "Unhinged" is an unusual choice. Taken literally, a thing that is unhinged has come off its hinges, like a door, so the weapons would be disabled and no longer able to swing. It also carries the more familiar sense of madness, which hints that the person being addressed may be out of control. Whether the word is a deliberate double meaning or a near-miss for something like "unloaded," both readings fit a speaker asking for the danger to be switched off. The word "just" works in two ways as well, meaning both "simply" and "only." The request is modest: be gentle, and love me without hurting me.
That shift is what makes the poem worth reading. The first five lines describe, but the last one asks, and the verb changes from statements about what has been done to an imperative. The poem takes the old idea that love can wound, which could easily sound like a cliché, and strips it of ornament. There are no flowers, no arrows from the sky, only a dagger, a punch and a shot, named bluntly. Against that violence, the closing request is almost shockingly simple. The poem suggests that the opposite of a weapon isn't absence but ordinary tenderness, and that the speaker wants nothing more elaborate than that.