The Ultraviolet Catastrophe -- Summer Poetry 2010

Thanks!

dishes

girl in a red dress,
every twitch of her hip
like the tug of a grin at
the side of a mouth.

high heels – white, a little smudged,
no doubt the new wife of a sailor as she wears
the cologne of seaspray off rocks and
lye. hands gloveless, she smiles
past the man with the fruitstand, with his opus
of oranges, canteloupe soft-headed as newborns' –
and when she crosses the busy street
at noon
in manhattan

i am the only one to take notice,
like the breathing of my child at night,
when i cant sleep.


trains

and the red meadow flowers along
the railroad tracks are rusted and sudden,
like the hammerblows of rail-men. I walk
all the way out of town on these tracks,
until I get to a string of box-cars –
squatted in by hobos with duct taped pants
and army surplus jackets –

graffitied – the calligraphy of the city-depths,
sprayed glyphs of the dead language of
the next generation, balloon-like, with the insensitive
geometry of a clown's laugh. the sad cattled
box-cars hot-iron branded by gang symbols –
these new vaqueros of rap and rooster tail
of blue bandana.

storm-glass heat, even at night, when the streetlights
tuck their heads in like cooped hens, and the crickets
are the wind-click of a music box. I walk these tracks, this
progenitor of the I-5, the sledged, oxidized trail
loping into the hills, pilgrim into the jericho fall
of the night's seventh trumpetblast.

we do not walk until the soles of our sneakers
are worn down, or until our lips chap like harmonica notes –
we walk until we cannot smell the smog, or taste
the grit of the city-lights in our teeth, only until we can
see every star, appearing all at once,
in solstice aggregate.

io

I'm not well-versed in mythology, so I looked this up after reading it for the first time. And I was delighted to discover how all the details fitted in. Granted, lines like 'and now, puzzlingly, the cloying clobber of an udder' are going to make little sense to someone who's not familiar with the tale - but even then, you balance that well by having the title being so exclusive to an audience. Or rather, to their intelligence. This is a very still poem, a very caught-in-the-moment poem. Yes, there is a story behind it all, but what you're essentially doing here is describing her current state. Like a camera. Is that your intention? Or did you want to go for something more dynamic?

Also, a word of caution about the vocabulary. Since it's essentially a Greek myth, it'd be great to see you use more obscure words derived from Greek, rather than any other language. (Nymphs, diacritic etc - great ). It would add such an authentic flavour to the writing. As it is, with words like 'rococo,' 'myrrh' [is this not Arabic?], and 'french,' [why drag the French into it], they sort of jump us in and out of different cultures for the briefest moment. Tie it up a bit more. Replace them.

The ending was great.

fishing

Another still poem. Can't say I enjoyed this one - despite the vocab, it felt predictable. In fact, the bits of imagery that used interesting vocabulary here were about the only thing holding it up. Perhaps more character interaction is what this needed - but then again, I'm not entirely sure how much you could incorporate since it is about fishing. Something thoughtful, then? Since they have all this time to think? Yes, now that I think about it, a metaphor is what this needs. An extended metaphor tying it up and hooking us in like a fishing line.

fraternal

I'm surprised I haven't commented on this one already. I definitely enjoyed this one, even more so since it had one of those endings that acts as pointers for the reader to go read this poem again. A virtuous cycle of non-stop readings. I'm curious as to why you capitalised the 'I' here when you tend not to do so in your other poems. This poem was poignant, it was suffocatingly and expansively so - this kind of familial relationship that you describe; it's strange, but I think it could just as easily apply to sisters, to the child-parent relationship. Of course, the details would be different, then, but the feeling would be much the same. What sort of does ruin it for me a bit is the repetition of 'share' that makes it seem like a long list, albeit imaginatively described. I like the idea of sharing. It's the whole give-take thing that goes on between siblings, so it's great. I just think you might be a bit more subtle about it.

And the ending - how can I not mention this? I was so sure this was about brothers. And then, when you say, 'I decide to share with him my first kiss in an old car...her lips on mine, and yours, too' that throws everything out of perspective. I assume, of course, you mean the narrator shares the memory of the kiss so that the experiences become muddled - so that while the first is remembering, the second is experiencing (figuratively). This has an especially powerful impact - I have been thinking about why that is, actually, and I believe I have it: the previous stanzas are about sharing. Sharing sounds like division, an equal partition. But this - this is like amalgamation. It's so different to anything we've seen before, but it rings especially true - sometimes we live through our siblings as well as our children. So yes, full of depth.

dishes

Yes! A celebration of the minute, the commonplace. We have not seen enough of this, lately. Don't you think that there is something so fascinating about the near-mundane that it merits us dwelling on it? And equally so, this poem is kept short. I loved, 'every twitch of her hip / like the tug of a grin at / the side of a mouth.' I question the spacing of 'at noon / in manhattan,' though. At first I thought I liked it - sort of makes the details stand out to us a lot more. But then, it does seem unecessary; I guess it's a break or a bridge, then, between the 'busy street' and 'i am the only one watching her.' Sort of like the last heave before the curtain rises. Didn't think the ending simile was particularly effective.

trains

I seem to have noticed that this one and 'dishes' both began with the colour red. The middle two stanzas are overbalanced imagery-wise. Descriptive, but not particularly meaningful - they lack the graceful clarity of some of your more recent poems. I think more verbs here would be nice. More of the character, not just what he sees. 'Solstice aggregate' - too much of a mouthful. This ending should be a ta-da! ending with the way you've introduced it in the lne previous - as it is, the jumble of consonants just mushes it up.

--

But yes, I sometimes cannot comprehend how you can write this much. And well.

Thanks!

There is really no relation to each part below. But maybe.

physics

i. frictive

but why is friction always regarded
as a negative force, drawn in diagrams
as pulling back, retarding the progress
of the forward force of acceleration?
the very word is a skinned palm, a match
stricken – the head like a twisted ankle –
the flint and tinder of two claustrophobic syllables.
because without friction we could not walk, there would
be no point A, point B, no glassy heat generated between two
falling bodies in a meniscus of bedsheets,
and an object bumped would continue on forever,
like a worry in the night,
or an irrational number.

ii. whispers

there is a heliocentricity to the windowsill-
blossoms, with their valence shell of bees
traded with the wind covalently. these little epicenters
remind you that it is a long way down, that the law
of falling bodies applies here, too, above
the manhattan pavement. I watch the way
you cut the last summer tomato, quick strokes,
halving, the bones in your hand standing out
like struck typewriter arms, knuckles white.
the tomato lobes glide away, unzipped, and the blossoms
on the windowsill bend in closer to hear your pulse,
that maddening, beneath-the-floorboards rhythm,
because people pay attention when important things
are whispered, or hidden.

iii. harris beach

the ocean tides recede,
like a bow across a cello's strings
to continue a note.

for some reason, it is the post-sunset
spectrum of visible light, layered in saturnal
rings across the horizon that takes my breath away,
and not the sunset itself, in ground and chapped pastels –
it is a period of transition, like autumn, or a year
of widowhood.

iv. lengths

and I do not count the rings of a tree stump,
I look for the periods of drought, fire, plenty,
because these are the lengths that
defined a tree –
its unsplittable knotholes.



A/N: Originally part 3 and 4 were combined. Good call/bad call?

Hi Kylan,

Gonna take the first poem right now and the others when I have more time, hopefully tonight.

If it had been anybody else but you, I would not have mentioned half the things I found wrong in this one. But it is you who wrote this and your talent will survive it, bad as this work may be.

As I said in chat, they aren't impressive pieces. I don't know what exactly pleased you about the first poem, but I found nothing redeeming about it during my first read. Then I tried again, and again. All I'm receiving is a piece dedicated only to itself. Sure, it's ostensibly about friction; really? You're a better writer, and moreover poet, than what you portray here. This was designed - perhaps subconsciously - to yell out to the world "Look at me! I like science!"

I can make one good comment on frictive. I've had the misfortune to read downright ugly recent science poetry on this site in the past few days/weeks. Yours doesn't sound as nihilistically self-pleasuring as those ones. It has a certain innocence to it, which is a good thing.

i. frictive

but why is friction always regarded
as a negative force, drawn in diagrams
as pulling back, retarding the progress
of the forward force of acceleration?

I would have liked this opening, and I tried very much to. However, the impact of the "straightforwardness" you tried to inject into your beginning is contingent by what follows after, and in this case, these four lines aren't a prelude to anything special. The reader sees the liftoff and expects there to be some kind of rocket explosion afterwards, some kind of rapid catharsis approaching, but instead gets...

the very word is a skinned palm, a match
stricken – the head like a twisted ankle –
the flint and tinder of two claustrophobic syllables.

this. The first two lines in the above quote have nice imagery, yes. But then you bring us back into the boring world of dusty grammarians and headaching mundanity of dissecting the nature of "friction" itself. Yes, we get it. You find fault with the way friction is portrayed, be it the way it is written and what that symbolically implies or the way it is drawn.

Move on. You only have so much space in which to write, and once you start bringing us to the metaphors and analogies, don't go fleeing back to the sub-theme of the beginning lines of the poem.

because without friction we could not walk, there would
be no point A, point B, no glassy heat generated between two
falling bodies in a meniscus of bedsheets,
and an object bumped would continue on forever,
like a worry in the night,
or an irrational number.

This is machine gun imagery right here, and it is doing nothing for the pieces. References to walking, heat, sex, pure movement, anxiety, and... mathematics? How do these all fit in to one another? I am frustrated especially with the potential that the "falling bodies", etc, had. You could have used a running image throughout the poem, comparing friction's quarrel with other forces with the duality of sex - beauty and ugliness, hot skin and cold pillows, a moment's passion and a regretful afterthought. But the reader was just thrown a bone for a split second as you moved on to your next image, then the next, then the next...

I understand what you're trying to do here. Simplicity in your poetry. And be assured that I see that it's working in degrees; like I said above, on a scale of 1 to 10 compared to others, it would be a 9. But compared to yourself, no. In short poems, it's especially important to stick to one conception throughout instead of a rapid-fire execution.

Work on this. It has the ability to be a perfect blend, you just haven't reached it yet.

(And yes, I realize that a lot of what I said, including the little rant about science poetry, makes me a hypocrite, but take my words for what they're worth...)

Hope that helped,
Galerius

Thanks Gal!

at the bronx zoo with grandpa

your voice is a river carving a canyon –
silty, with shelves of strata,
and wearing away at the pueblo sandstone,
thrones and chapels, speaking with the reverence
and dome of cathedral-builders. when you whisper,
i can hear the grind
of the ancient's pestels.

you show me the aviary, the strange fruit
of perched birds, little tuned nodes, feathers
purling water droplets – heads cocked
sideways as if having heard the half-strung, unripe
note of a child practicing violin in the living room.
birds of paradise twitching, whirring
like clockparts – solutions to god's boredom on the sixth day.
i watch them in mating dance, gumshoeing, spread,
desperate tarantella to please the plain-looking females,
with calls like lost buttons, or stitches sewn
by thimble-less fingers.

you tell me that birds were the progeny of reptiles,
and then we move on to the reptile cages, drought-skinned
lizards with rolltop eyelids, the intermittant radio
signal of the tongue. snakes knot like
nervous stomachs around sacked lunar eggs. i look for feathers,
talons, two-chambered hearts, but there is no crane-grace
to these, no song, no closeness to the sun.

and the lions are tired, ears like pages-corners
marked for re-reading, suck-toothed. i can only
barely hear the tar-beat of the savannah from their
purrs and pulses, the palm-strike
of the djembe, hoof-clatter of gazelles, skinny
as light through a summerdress.

we leave, and i percuss in
evening sunlight, shadows drawn
like charcoaled fingers across cave walls,
the bone-creak of ancestry and a flash of incisors
in your voice, as you ask me

whether i'd like vanilla
or neapolitan ice cream
from the vendor.

période rose et bleu (or, deserts)

ridges in the sand underfoot,
wavy, inked with shadows like
the lunge of arabic characters. the desert heat
is a pueblo dancer with a headdress
of sun and feathers abandoned
in canyon, turning.

the mission bells undress and
swing from a rope into the swimminghole of each
of their own afterchurch tolls. a scorpion
uncurls like a baby's fist, and the
cactus flowers are stung ankles,
with only a night moth as a pollinator,
a feeling of closeness.

we ride on painted horses, swiveling
in the loose slips of a mirage. here,
the world goes by its indian name. we can
find our own image in the rorshach bone of a cattle skull,
our song in the woodwind flight of a red-tailed hawk –
we ride to the top of the ridge, to a
galapagos of low summer
lakes spread be(for)e us, as if we were
gods returned.

now, you stand at a dark window,
alone, burnt, like the chimney after
a housefire. santa annas of your hair
in my face, the scalped moon in
the rainbarrel, the kicked dog
of a doubled shadow.

I come up behind you.
the moon is at her holiest
here.

--

And with this one, I put the last stanza I wrote originally in a spoiler box, because I think the poem may be fine without it. You tell me.

listening

small motor of each heartbeat
that i am conscious of now as i
read about clogged arteries, plaque,
yellow galoshes of fat, and the number
of times a heart pumps in the lifetime
of a man, taking no union-mandated ten
minute break, except for the small richter
of an all-stop later in life, as the hand comes
to the chest, as if to catch the escaping spasms,
each dull-skinned plum-beat, the valved
middle c – the heart shivering like a
blossom rummaged for pollen.

i close my eyes, and think about the rhythm,
pulsing, steaming, like a hot kitchen on baking
day. i try to slow it down as much as possible,
conserving the faster waltz for last, until each systole
comes well-formed, paid attention to, slow
and hand-peeled.

Spoiler

i ask her to put her hand to my chest,
to listen like an indian scout with his
ear to the cracked earth for what is
coming, and how many, and
for how long.

... I was halfway done and the page refreshed...

.________.

Ugh, I hate that.

Dishes -

The emotion you portray is good, well communicate in the respect to the point of view. But I feel it was overly subtle. Your use of POV is well done, but the way you do it makes the general poem mundane. Your communicating big feeling, with small things like cantaloupe. This is clever but you manage to smother most of that big feeling, and it loses a lot of value. So you haven't balanced out your POV well enough.

This person is clearly not simply glancing over your concept, they're examining it. So they would absorb a little more of that sweet feeling and that's exactly what you want your reader to feel. The feeling of a bystander to the whole story, it's just a little taste to something they can't fit into without it being a personal experience. So you got to balance out your POV and emotional value with your words. Just a pinch stronger and it'll be great.

Trains -

It's nice to see you step out a bit of your niche subject wise. Even if it's just a little bit. Sure it doesn't work out all too well, but it was worth a shot. This would of worked a lot better if you'd taken a bigger step. You almost always use soft, fluttery and clever images and subtle ways of attaching things together. Adapt to your subject. Here you're talking about hardened parts of the city. The train tracks, hobos, graffiti etc. Soft fluttery images and subtle connections don't mesh well in my mind. Sure it's always lovely, but it's not as nice in the fine print.

Continue to change your typical resting place. Or at least test new waters. We know your wonderful at science poems, at poems with a certain nostalgic feel to them. Be a little bit more flexible, you might find another thing you're comfortable with.

Physics -

Honestly, one word. Boring. Just empty, and voided of any feeling. That's what I tend to find in most science related poems, that aren't so science - y. They're completely stale; because they're based on subjects or terms that follow rules. Things like friction, it charges; it slows down, increases resistance. You've taken that that and attached a couple what ifs to it. Nothing all to special. Same with the others, all these mapped out concepts attached, you map out your poem. Quite simply you haven't done anything special with them. Though I will admit, you do have some good images. They just kind of float on top of a watery idea.

(good call breaking up part 3 and 4 though)

I'll get to the rest tomorrow evening (My time of course) before I take off. Hopefully it won't refresh halfway through.
Thanks for the read.

Kamas

painted woman

your oil paints mixed
like feelings on seeing
a piece of abstract art –
geometric shapes rutting,
combusting and rubbed off their
edges like bees dying purely
for sweetness –

it was the small of my back, the glacial
easing of my bones across
the purposefully unmade bed, or the way
the light hooked little shadows
under each of my vertebrae
when I turned just right.

maybe it was the angles of
my face that you told me was
your favorite part to paint, my small
creases of light, like laundry folded
on sunday morning. i would lie
for hours, glowing, as your
paintbrush pursued my cusps
and hollows across stuccoed canvas
savannas, as if my lines
were gazelles in morning.

on saturday i saw myself hanging in a gallery,
daubs of paint raised like an oilbased
braille, so that you could read the
decrescendo of my hips, the hammock
of my back. you cannot see my face.
I am between two pillars.

you have called me
portrait #16.

Part 2:

at the bronx zoo with grandpa -

I'm a bit iffy on this one. One thing I'm certain that it's, as we say here "Beaucoup de blahblahblah" meaning, you talk a lot (and quite well) but in the end it's quite pointless. In the case of this poem, you've communicated some good strong images and well described, but it feels wrong, out of context completely. When I think of a zoo I think f it in a more childish perspective. It sounds like everything you've told me would come out of a poetic zoologist.

I think I mentioned this problem in part 1 of my review, maybe not. Sometimes, you just don't connect with your persona and it feels completely disconnected, not forced but slightly pushed. And you get a sense of things, of what you're trying to communicate, but you just cannot connect with the poem. It's like you built half a bridge, we can see it, hear it maybe, but you just don't take us there and wrap us up in images.

(Boy I sound demanding.)

période rose et bleu (or, deserts) -

Hm, somewhat, typical? Not exactly, but I've felt I've heard it before/seen it before (and I never have.)
It's not that the images are cliches, of course.
It had an exotic feel to it, which works perfectly with my mood and with your typical diligence, you describe things so vividly. It's lovely all in all.

One thing, I feel like this poem is bordering overstuffed (imagery wise) I feel like you're feeding me image after image after image. There isn't any wiggle room, breathing space and it doesn't flow, the entire poem is one giant tidal wave.
So, without that ability to breathe, relax a little I come out of it with a little less then I could of.

example:

find our own image in the rorshach bone of a cattle skull,
our song in the woodwind flight of a red-tailed hawk –
we ride to the top of the ridge,

so in three little lines - image, bone, cattle skull, singing, woodwind instrumental sound, red tail, hawk, ridge/cliff

Phew. That's a lot.

You get the idea, trim this poem a little, don't get too carried away in images, or you'll drown your reader.


listening -

The part you put in the spoiler box can be cut. It's fine the the way it is. Adding that stanza would kill the sweetness and finality of the previous stanza. The closing is lovely that way, it's slow and right at the right spot, with surprisingly the right word.

It works, here you paced your images, your words. So it comes out really sweet and clean. You started off a little shaky at the beginning, packing one too many images into the beginning, but you slow down halfway through and continue all the way through. Good stuff.

--

It refreshed again -.- So this came later then planned. Your most recent one will be reviewed at some point.
Hope this helped a little.

Kamas

Kylan, Kylan, how long has it been since I've told you what I think of your works?

I adore them, simply put.


On période rose et bleu (or, deserts)

of sun and feathers abandoned
in canyon, turning.

For poetic effect, I see how this could work; I don't like it because it's ending a stanza, and while it could work (as an image descending, painting a good picture), I'm not fond of it because the "turning" on the end feels like it's idling, and I think you'd be better off without.

lakes spread be(for)e us, as if we were
gods returned.

I'm a bit quizzed on why you didn't say "returning gods" -- I think the poem is set in present tense, dear, and the scenery is being described in a creation-past tense, and because of this, I think you should keep this part active.

The poem itself, I enjoy. The cadence of images in the way you've structured them here gives this poem a very laid back, melancholic air, which I appreciate endlessly. I felt, however, that in some spots, you didn't fulfill what the image was asking of you. I adore the style you've used here, yes, but ask yourself: is the poem able to handle the restrictions of short description?

I'll say again, I adore the poem. I adore your images, your word choice, but what I'm not so hot about is the fact that this poem is less alive than your others (a good and bad thing, depending), and I'm torn at saying this is good or bad, because there is something that you've woven with your words that reminds me of a desert, and that part, I'm in love with.

Nicely done, keep writing,

June

Sorry to make two consecutive posts so close together. It makes me look bad, but, I thought I had another engagement, but I didn't, so.

On listening

I believe that the poem stands better with the final stanza, than it would without. As I read, I felt that this poem was thick, too close together, and could do with a bit of space to allow this to breathe; let the images sink in and express themselves on their own before you introduce a new one, dear, because I feel that, here,

except for the small richter
of an all-stop later in life, as the hand comes
to the chest, as if to catch the escaping spasms,
each dull-skinned plum-beat, the valved
middle c – the heart shivering like a
blossom rummaged for pollen.

this bit is too covered in the dust of the previous part for us to fully grasp the weight of what you're saying. Nonetheless, beautiful description here.

i ask her to put her hand to my chest,
to listen like an indian scout with his
ear to the cracked earth for what is
coming, and how many, and
for how long.

I adore this piece, mostly because of the ending metaphor, because I feel that you could fend better with a different opening to this. I like it, but I feel that this "I ask her" is too calm, too laidback, and for what you're writing about, I think that this could stand a bit of dramatization for effect, dear.

On painted woman

Of these three last posted, this is my personal favorite, because it personifies what was previously de-personified (that made more sense in my head), and all together, it's simple and elegant.

Your word choice in this poem is excellent. You do not choose from a wide range of vocabulary that sends our mind to look at images choicely unrelated, except for that one gazelle image, which I do think works beautifully, except,

savannas, as if my lines
were gazelles in morning.

I'm unsure if you're talking about facial lines, and think that clarification would aid. Also, gazelles in morning -- do you mean the literal morning, like daylight, or mourning?

The closing brings this together nicely, although I am not sure that how you said "I am between two pillars" works for me, dear. Could very well be just me, but I felt that this kind of took down the tone of the poem a few notches because it bordered the drab side of simplicity.

Nonetheless, I am absolutely in love with this one -- I love it, for the description you used, for how clearly your words constructed and supported an image and for the simple fact that you wrote this well.

Continue,

June

Thanks June!

NOTE: Reviewers, don't bother with this one.

seti

and all the cupped deepspace radio dishes turn slowly
westward, like the pull of a blossom's head
toward the sun in time lapse, or allatonce
a savannah full of gazelle's heads rising at heavy breathing
and snapping twigs –
probing for quasars, pulsars, signals subtle
and scentless as mammal pheromones. we search
for shape, for the slow spin of a galaxy, turned
like an new dress modeled
from all sides.

somehow, it all comes back to statistics,
percentages, numbers, read-outs, that semi-religious
sect of probability – and water. take mars,
fractions further from the sun, its surface
chapped, dry as the bible's small books,
old troughs and rivers reduced to veins,
waterless deltas. and what cosmic significance
in this acute tilt of the earth – this planetary pisa –
to bake us just so, and evenly.

or the tides, the gentle nudges, tugs
like an old horse responding, bitless.
we are thrums, vibrations. we are waves and radiation.
we are our own fields of gravity, Dust. it is in
the unraveling of the dna of a cell before
the twin womb of mitosis that my doubt lies. it is in the
pull of water against gravity
up the trunks of the coastal redwoods,
robed in mist and footed by cryptic and fungal
ladies-in-waiting, like queens
posing for portraiture.

but how can I comprehend infinity, when
everything I am is a beginning and an end,
when a life is merely, a string unknotted,
unraveled. I cannot even see time
as a dimension, I am not
even a mountain.

vesuvius of a star in nova,
planets doomed and bright
as uneaten fruit. an astronaut floats in space,
helmet like an old pearl, visor reflecting
vacuums. he sees what I see in god.
it is not like staring into the dark.

vacuums (OR -less)

the chrysanthemums are yawning
lionesses, solariums of petals – i trace their
veins in search of small beauty. little hints
at the rebellion against gravity, against
fourteen point seven pounds per square inch of pressure
drawing us to the ground, against vacuums
and apples dropping, like voices in church.

all of the teacups are empty, small porcelain
polio, their fumbling handles, full of nothing
and feeling it very keenly, like biblical women
with barren, unblessed wombs. i ask myself where
the center of my body is. i keep telling myself
that it is not where nature intended it, that
true civilization is the shifting of centricity,
around which I spin, centripital
like a planet in far, weak orbit, almost
not a planet at all.

i fill the shoeboxes and jars with this emptiness, try
to shake my shoes of that small, digging
pebble of null at the toe. it is only in these flowers,
their mouths full of pins, like seamstresses,
that i see any spaces filled, any waveless
stillness.

what frightens me is that their heads
are their wombs. sore, rubbed,
they gleam with the quiet polish of reproduction,
little swinging gondolas in the ferris wheel of
the cycle of life. they are bright, with strong
centers of balance, like confident women
with slender necks and beeless opinions.
they live for the next generation, which
will live for the next – these selfless
pleasureless vulvae.

in the kitchen, my bedroom, the hallways
i find empty things. we are vacuums, abhorring.
I try to trace my equators, tropics, wavery
lines of latitude and longitude, poles and
tilted head to the sun so that I might find
this centre -- an origin, a prehistory,
something to rebuild from.

This latest was just about to begin growing on me until the latter half, whereupon it summarised the main idea too quickly.

I'll start off by saying that I liked what you were exploring here. Vaccuums, emptiness, a centre - in effect, the meaning of life, beautifully disguised in the metaphor of flowers which you continue throughout the poem. I'll take it stanza by stanza.

the chrysanthemums are yawning
lionesses, solariums of petals – i trace their
veins in search of small beauty. little hints
at the rebellion against gravity, against
fourteen point seven pounds per square inch of pressure
drawing us to the ground, against vacuums
and apples dropping, like voices in church.

Okay. Introduction to the flowers. Beauty (perhaps a hint at aesthetics as a pursuit of life?). Gravity, if only for the sake of introducing the vacuums. I do not like how gravity is thrown in here, shamelessly scientific, with little hint later on that you will consider physics (however, I do note that you considered - briefly - the ecological/evolutionary/biological model - to put it bluntly: the propagation of the species as being the sole purpose of life). I don't think something as sternly sharp as physics belongs here, other than that mention of a vaccuum - but even then, I can see that it is more an emotional vacuum than a physical one that you emphasise. If you want it to belong, make it a tighter motif as you have done with the flowers. If not, remove it. And while I see one other religious mention - 'biblical' - in conjunction with this 'voices in a church' part, I do not really see it tying in elsewhere. Again, religion would be an interesting thing to link in more recurrently. As it is, I think the poem does well enough without either of these two motifs; there's enough there to chew over and think about.

all of the teacups are empty, small porcelain
polio, their fumbling handles, full of nothing
and feeling it very keenly, like biblical women
with barren, unblessed wombs. i ask myself where
the center of my body is. i keep telling myself
that it is not where nature intended it, that
true civilization is the shifting of centricity,
around which I spin, centripital
like a planet in far, weak orbit, almost
not a planet at all.

Not a mention of flowers here, which you appear to dwell on in three stanzas out of five. It seems the teacups are thrown in there for the sake of the emptiness. I would like to see you challenge yourself and link your two major themes/images - vacuum/emptiness and flowers/centricity much, much more tightly. Juxtapose them closer, if a metaphor is out of order. At the line 'i ask myself where the centre of my body is' I wondered if we were getting into a discussion of head/heart (vs bellybutton!) -- this might have been interesting to have considered more fully as well, instead of half-throwing the idea out there. Again, the planets are great, but too stark, concrete, defined for the theme of this poem. The theme is much more abstract, more philosophical, emotional, one might say, and the physics is too clear-cut for it; every time you begin a soft, hazy contemplation, physics unbalances that softness; it hardens it.

(While I enjoy physics, here I do not see how it belongs. If you want to make it belong, think of possible themes to tie it to (but I think that would bloat the poem somewhat): perhaps contrasting that in biology/life, things are not as clear-cut as they are in the laws of physics? That there is no one 'rule' or 'law' that can apply to why one is alive like it does to how the physical world works? But yes, too sharp for my liking. Too much of a task to tie it in with flowers decently.)

i fill the shoeboxes and jars with this emptiness, try
to shake my shoes of that small, digging
pebble of null at the toe. it is only in these flowers,
their mouths full of pins, like seamstresses,
that i see any spaces filled, any waveless
stillness.

As individual images, I like the image of teacups and shoeboxes and jars filled with nothingness. As a part of a whole, it seems these items are competing with the flowers for attention. The focus is shifted too messily - we are inside with the shoeboxes, then we meander outside to the flowers. A link between the two would be great. An amalgamation of motifs.

what frightens me is that their heads
are their wombs. sore, rubbed,
they gleam with the quiet polish of reproduction,
little swinging gondolas in the ferris wheel of
the cycle of life. they are bright, with strong
centers of balance, like confident women
with slender necks and beeless opinions.
they live for the next generation, which
will live for the next – these selfless
pleasureless vulvae.

'What frightens me is their heads / are their wombs' - loved this line. That terrifies me when I read it written like that, too. Here you draw out the flowers, the 'centre' or 'meaning' being the 'womb' or 'reproduction' - but it got just slightly too obvious towards the end. I don't think that degree of description was required; 'selfless, pleasureless vulvae' was overkill.

in the kitchen, my bedroom, the hallways
i find empty things. we are vacuums, abhorring.
I try to trace my equators, tropics, wavery
lines of latitude and longitude, poles and
tilted head to the sun so that I might find
this centre -- an origin, a prehistory,
something to rebuild from.

Were it capitalised, it would have been much worse. Too obvious. Too blatant. And - most of all - too clear in a poem where clarity of this type seems horribly out of place. Do we need an explanation of why this is the theme? I do not think so; the questions raised are enough. In fact, I'd like to consider the questions further at the end of the poem, but the ending stops me from doing so, simply because it slaps the reason for writing in my face.

--

Overall, I appreciate what you are trying to do here. Hell, I even applaud it. Now the fantastical imagery serves a brilliantly greater purpose - to make some kind of a point that cuts right to the core, that asks intellectual questions and does not just parade a scene or a person for the sake of showing off poeticism. The tone here gives away the feeling - hushed, on tiptoe, nervous, bizarre, empty, spiralling, lost. It's nicely kept subtle to allow the greater weight to be given the the 'head' aspect - appropriate, I'd say. My only suggestion is to string together or meld the two too-different aspects of it better.



Navita

Interesting interpretation, Navita. One thing I love about your critiques is how willing you are to delve beneath the deeper themes and beatings of a piece.

I wrote this piece to initially be about abortion. However, as I continued to write it, it felt to me to be more about the overemphasis of the sexual being. The narrator -- from the abortion point of view -- is finding all these empty spaces in the aftermath (teacups, shoeboxes). She is also frustrated by these feelings of emptiness, because she feels that she should not be so affected by her "womb", her primitive femininity. She finds innate beauty in the flower, but also know that the flower is more or less one giant sexual organ. She searches for her center, something beautiful, but also inorganic and her own. The "center" (unborn child) that was removed from her, as in many abortions, by a vacuum. However, I also found myself writing from a gender perspective. We are so often defined by sexuality. By having so much emphasis put on our sexuality, our intellectual beings and emotional beings take the backseat -- a feeling that is, at least to me, profoundly emptying.

Hope that helped, though I will definitely take some of your suggestions,

-Kylan