You know someones in there crying out her eyeballs.
You know someone's in there crying out her eyeballs. Sebastian Kopp / GETTY IMAGES

I was looking at my horrible hair in the mirror today and was reminded of a good poem by Kim Addonizio. Bad hair is not the point of "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall," nor is the line about hair the best one in the poem. But the hair line is snappy in a way that has stuck with me forever, and when I remember it I can remember the other lines that make this poem such a worthy entry into the contemporary canon. You can find it in a collaborative chapbook by Addonizio and Brittany Perham called The Night Could Go In Either Direction.

A few notes:

• I know you want to pause at line breaks. It's natural. We all do it. But as with so many contemporary poems, when you read this one for the first time, you're just going to have to ignore them. Once poets stopped writing in metrical verse, the work the line could do really opened up, and poets started taking advantage of the ways space on the page can be used to make more meaning. In this case, the line breaks inject meaning into the poem that wouldn't otherwise be there if she merely broke each line with each new sentence, and their run-on quality reflects the spiraling state of the speaker and her subject. But when you read it aloud, the sense of the sentence should be privileged over the line break's implied pause.

• "backed away / from a mirror that wanted to kill you" is the best line in the poem, the one I always remember after I remember the line about the hair.

• Though the line breaks wonderfully bust up the syntax, and though the scenarios she describes seem random, Addonizio uses internal rhyme to create cohesion in the poem. The long "O" in "woke" links to "close" and then to "open." Then "stood" links to "good," as "beach" links "seaweed" to "seat." Addonizio powers down the page that way until she breaks from her own constraints, cuts off her lyrical stitching with a backslash and gets straight to the point with a burst of plainspoken speech: "listen I love you joy is coming." That line wouldn't hit so hard without all that careful soundplay before it. It's an incredible display of musical control, and truly one of the great short poems.