Young Writers Society

Death was semi-deciduous, following you
around like it was lost and you dared to feed it,
crawling with its pincers pinching and its mandibles
laughing;

just how much of your soul did you give It?

you were eight, and you were at
school like the good little girl that you were when you
found the dead bird in the yard. It was a young finch, small as your child-sized palm, like
it had been fitted to the lines of your hands, like this moment was
supposed to happen.
Curiosity picked it up and empathy cradled it in your arms, stroking still feathers
that rustled beneath your fingertips.
Its eyes were still
open, forced to watch the evils of the world, even
having passed from it,

yet they seemed so familiar, like the photographs of a mother who was never there, a mother who'd abandoned you for death. there was sentience in death. there was kinship.

and you just stared and stared, and suddenly, it wasn’t
dead anymore, and it stared back.
and its eyes felt your own with a love you’ve never known. you looked at your hands, unsure where the blood had come from, terrified at what you'd done. death was not meant to be thwarted.

You never told anyone, not until you were
fifteen and the world seemed like it was collapsing with
the stranger’s smoke-filled lungs as you cradled his head to your chest on a street and streamed
tears down onto his fire-torn face like heaven’s last rain. Not until
desperation poured onto him, desperation for someone else to know your heart
and you whispered to him.
“I wish I could make things right.
That things would be right, and things wouldn’t die, and they would live
like I wanted them to.”
But, they didn’t, and they died in your hands like you were guilty,

even though you did nothing wrong, didn’t even know what happened, and were too numb to find out. his is a tarnished memory, all because of you, and so the guilt lives on. you never made him worth it.

and the tears didn’t seem to stop, not until you were twenty-three
and too numb to
feel them streaming and weening off the
tips of your nose and chin and neck, and crashing stalacite-like while
you refused to acknowledge the voice chiming your
father’s death, who used to swear he'd never die. The woman on the phone
wasn't sad enough; she didn't know about the promises he'd made, and how
he let go of them so easily, pushing them away from death and abandoning
carcasses to you.

death drowns promises in itself, chokes them on its essence and laughs as they decay beside it. promises are trophies to be broken, and nothing more.

You never went to the funeral; lies didn’t deserve
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights
off, and the house dark
so he couldn’t see you through the ceiling.

and bitterness washed away every good memory you might have kept as you rubbed them from your eyes, red and raw with salt: it tore at your skin.

Forgiveness only came at thirty-one, when death reached into your spine,
plucking nerves and bone with its spiderling fingers and birthing pain
in a car crash-- you wept in the light when the glass hit
your face like crystal tears and you realized just how close death is

and that maybe you’d wasted all this time in hate,
and that maybe, no one ever means to die.

Hello

First comment is if you touch stanza one I will eat you. It is perfect, especially the italics line, it has such a good punch to it, questions the reader and becomes and effective hook!

In stanza two when you talk about her stroking the birds feather, I would add some emotion there. I would give it a secondary meaning almost. You will have read them like "She held her doll, like she wished her mother would hold her" A secondary meaning there I think would be extremely effective and heighten your bit. But I think it needs to come just afer she has stroked the birds feather.

The nex stanza, I think just some basic emotion. How would you react if you were holding something which was no longer dead? That type of emotion.

The next stanza has a lot of emotion, but it is hard to identify. I would look at your word choice and maybe change one or two words to just heighten the emotion which is already there, as it can become a very very powerful stanza.

Agressice emotion at the end of the next stanza would really make a reader think and I think it would tie the whole piece together, as she is quite angry and that resentment to the broken promise would work extremely well.

I think the next stanza works very well witht he detachted attitude as it shows her uncaring and numbness now, it also shows excellent character progression this stanza which makes it more powerful.

The last stanza has amazing imagery and thought. The emotion I would add would simply be, and all she could do was scream. Something like that. So it shows a secondary nature to the character and works well alongside the other italic pieces.

Everything in Italics is fine, and works well. I think these are good for breaking up the piece and give it a more personal view, as it shows the reader the authors views almost

I loved it, keep it up.

PM me for anything, and i'll go into more depth if needs

~Retro Disco666

Hi, Persephoneia!

Thanks for requesting this -- I had a real pleasure reading through it. I don't have much to say so this critique is going to be brief. Your writing is just fabulous, and you tackle an interesting subject and are able to incorporate a lot of emotion in a short amount of time. I just had a couple of comments.

The first is regarding the style, word choice and imagery. While I love it and am jealous of your ability to describe things poetically, it can get to be a bit much at times. For instance, I don't really understand what the purpose is of the italics line and why it goes for the whole length of the page. Can't you just incorporate those into your stanza like normal? I feel like they're supposed to have some sort of special impact, but I just don't get it.

Secondly, you started to loose me -- and this ties into my next comment, too -- around the second stanza or so when she talks about seeing the man. You jump into it quickly without much of a transition and we're still wondering what's happening when you move onto the thing about the dad, which seems to be little more then an afterthought. Slow your pace down and really get into what you're writing about. How did she find this man? Why didn't she call the cops? When you're telling a story in poetry, you should have equal focus on telling the story and being creative about it.

I don't really have anything else to add; I hope this helps! Good luck with your revisions.

~ Elinor

All i have to say is WOW! once again i'm left feeling like you are a completely different caliber of writer. I dont't feel worthy to be on this site with a writer of your form writes on it. Just completely floored by this one and how deep it is. I love it. Please keep writing!

Truly Amazing.

You never went to the funeral; lies didn’t deserve
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights
off, and the house dark
so he couldn’t see you through the ceiling.

That was just perfect. Whatever you do, don't change that stanza.
It was just perfect, there's not much else I can say, except an't wait to see more like this!
-Alex

Hi Coral! Sorry this took so long. xD I've been a bit preoccupied for the past two days or so.

The first comment I want to make is about your first stanza. It was awesome, to put it simply. The imagery was incredible, and it gave me that goose-bumpy, shivery feeling. (The one I have grown to adore over the years.) I have to say that I agree with the others, however, when they said that you started to lose them at around the second stanza.

The bit about the bird was decent, but after your first stanza, I was expecting more emotion, something that really grabbed me. It was good, but it didn't have that effect, I'm sad to say. And then after that, I was hoping that it would get better, but it seemed a little rushed. There wasn't much time for the real emotion to show through, and the transitions were, as Eli said, a bit on the jumpy side.

I'll repeat her advice and say slow down a bit and ease into it instead of pouncing on it quite so quickly.

However, I disagree about the italics. There was always something different about the bit you put into them, and I honestly enjoyed it. It was something different, that I wasn't quite used to seeing on a regular basis-- which I liked.

Also, I started to really enjoy the poem again here:

Persephoneia wrote:You never went to the funeral; lies didn’t deserve
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights
off, and the house dark
so he couldn’t see you through the ceiling.

I absolutely adored that stanza-- maybe more than I liked the first one. Upon reading it, I thought to myself, "Yes! This is what I was looking for!" It was on this stanza that I was back to being hooked, and I found myself wishing that the whole rest of the poem had that much of a punch for me.

So, in the end, I really did end up liking this. There are bits where I know you could do better, and I am still entirely envious of how well you write poetry.

Keep writing, and thanks for the read!

~~Cass

Cheers!

I'm here as requested. I've reread this like twice to get the full meaning, so let's get to the core. As a narrative poem I'd agree that the imaginery, the words used too, isn't bad - in a good way. The use of italic text here is an interesting idea, when looked at simply it looks like some kind of wisdom, a conclusion maybe, that makes you stop and think for a second. Rather interesting indeed.

Though now I have to switch to what bugged me. I'm aware all the reviews before me praise this work and I'm not saying that it's crap, but to get this straight, in my opinion this isn't a poem. I'm no poetry fanatic, believe me, but I couldn't find any kind of standarts of poetry from traditions - this poem has no rhythm nor flow. At first I honestly thought this would be a free verse poem, but later I found out that it's not. For me it felt like if you were using words like you felt like without being cautious about word count in each stanza or at least flow or rhythm. Without any kind of given flow or rhythm, I hardly can see this as a poem - it's a bold opinion, but that's what I think. Don't go on and blame me for saying all this, I'm a person that gives flow and rhythm a lot of importance - without it, the poem looses its magic, it gets harder to read, the reader has to try himself to set up some kind of a flow/rhythm, but finds out that there's just no helping to it, all that remains is to read it as a text. With a flow, the poem has that kind of magic that just makes the pictures flow like a bird in reader's mind, flow smoothly hand in hand with the words and give in overall great impression, imaginery and interests. I'm fully aware keeping the flow and rhythm in the poems is a tough work, but look at all the poetry writers from history - they wrote dozens, hundreds, all in all thousands of poems and all of them have flow, have rhythm, many of them inspire us, many of them are world-class and believed to be genius-made, to be perfect, even nowadays.

I believe you do have all the potential to write good poetry and I'd love to see you do better, but for that, I hope you'd consider sometimes focusing on flow too. Make that poem a work of originality, something that would echo in people's minds and resound proudly in your own conscience. Words and imaginery is first thing, rhythm is second, but one can't exist without another if you want it to be really a poem.

That's all I have to say. I praised not much and was short on it, but from my perspective, it's much better to know the bad and try to work with it than just know the best and overlook mistakes.

I hope I've helped,
Best regards,
Kyou ~

Hey Persy, I'm finally here for the review
This might be my favorite of yours. I feel like I've said that to you quite a few times recently, which I take to mean that you're improving ridiculously fast. It makes me a little jealous

You start your poem with a gorgeous little bit of description: "Death was semi-deciduous", but you never explain that description. After that opener you go on to describe death further, but I couldn't connect that description to "semi-deciduous. As a result, the wonderful stanza was tainted by confusion as to what you meant.

With line four you set yourself up for alliteration with "pincers pinching" but then don't use alliteration for "mandibles laughing". This really trips up the flow of the line. (also, for the personification aspect, people only have one mandible...I think)

I really liked the italicized sections throughout the poem. They have slight change in voice from the main stanzas, and add a lot of the piece's depth. I also appreciate the capitalization of "It" to refer to death as something greater and supernatural.

In stanza two, I found the second line to be very awkward and odd. The "like the good little girl that you were" makes the line really wordy, and doesn't add much that's actually meaningful to the poem. It also makes it sound like her being at school somehow made her a good little girl, but I'm not sure that an 8 year-old not playing hooky is all that big of an accomplishment.

In lines four and five you introduce the "like this moment was supposed to happen" cliche. I like the inclusion of a deeper driving force, and I feel it's important to the poem, but you can word that bit in a more original way.

I like the personification in line 6.

The last three lines of stanza 2 are based on a good idea, but I found the wording to be too blunt, and as a result, uninteresting. Keep that blue-grey tone continuous and give those lines some better language.

(side note: the italicized sections remind me of the narration in Max Payne)

and you just stared and stared, and suddenly, it wasn’t
dead anymore, and it stared back.
and its eyes felt your own with a love you’ve never known. you looked at your hands, unsure where the blood had come from, terrified at what you'd done. death was not meant to be thwarted.

This was my least favorite section in the poem. The wording is pretty bland in the first two lines, and you don't give much insight into what actually happened. Did she bring the bird back to life? Did the bird just wake up from being stunned? What is the meaning of the blood?
Slow down here and make your intentions more clear.

You start stanza four with "you never told anyone", but I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. What did she never tell anyone. The confusion here is a product of stanza three being so cryptic. Fixing up stanza 3 should make this more clear. If it doesn't, a better transition is needed.

The subjects dialogue with the dying man is so wordy and long that it loses a lot of its impact. Simplify it to the core meaning of what she's trying to say, and just give that. In this case, simpler will be more effective. She's communicating one of the deepest, most emotional ideas in the poem, so you don't want it bogged down in a big, complex sentence.

More excellence in italics after stanza four. Great job.

Here's your first sentence in stanza five without the line breaks.

and the tears didn’t seem to stop, not until you were twenty-three and too numb to feel them streaming and weening off the tips of your nose and chin and neck, and crashing stalacite-like while you refused to acknowledge the voice chiming your father’s death, who used to swear he'd never die.

I think you know what I'm going to say about that and its length

The wording of the last two lines is awkward and made me have trouble figuring out what you were trying to say. I think the "and abandoning carcasses to you" is the root of the problem.

In the next italics section, I prefer "decay inside it" to "decay beside it". Just a personal preference. I also think that "promises are trophies to be broken, and nothing more." would be better if you played with the wording so that you didn't have to use a comma. "Promises are nothing more than trophies to be broken" is a possibility. See what you like.

Stanza six was fantastic. That's all

and bitterness washed away every good memory you might have kept as you rubbed them from your eyes, red and raw with salt: it tore at your skin.

What is the "them" addressing? It would make more sense as "it", since that would mean you were addressing bitterness. If "them"=memories, you should reword this to make that more clear.

The final stanza felt rushed, like you needed to have her die so you threw her in a car accident. The description of what death does also has a very slow and methodical feel to it, which contradicts the speed at which car accidents happen. Slow down so she doesn't just die out of nowhere. Transition and build into her death.

Looking back, the bird defines a lot of this poem. If it was stunned, then the fact that it tricked her could lead to the distrust of death and dying that plagued her throughout her life. If she brought it back to life, then you have a whole piece of your story that needs to be fleshed out and made more clear. Either way, the bird is the starting point of the events that occur later in her life, so you should make sure that that event is made clear.

Excellent work. You moved out of your normal style (while still keeping it very Persy-like) and gave the poem some great depth beneath all of the description. You communicated your emotion well and kept the tone pretty consistent throughout. Really nice job.

Kafka here. So, first of all, congratulations on placing first in my contest! I'll try not to make this too long, but I hope you can forgive me if I ramble a bit. So! To business.

I'll start with the flow. Overall, I do like the rhythm you attributed to this - as always, your line breaks are near perfect. However, it's when I hit the italicized lines that I begin to encounter a problem. It's almost like, in these parts, you wrote lines like you normally would - same voice, same emotional atmosphere - except you also clipped them all together into one enormous line. Not only does this conflict with the flow, but it conflicts with the voice as well. Since your line break locations had been such a defining characteristic of the poem, suddenly taking them away is both disorienting and frustrating for the reader. I say this because said reader always wants to be able to predict how the poem will flow, and the writer will likewise want to allow them to do so. In this dominion, adding unexpected twists and turns is what you want to avoid. Establish a rhythm and keep with it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if what this poem possesses could exactly be called a "rhythm," but it works poetically nonetheless. "Experimental poetry" is more and more beginning to lose its unprofessional connotation and simply be accepted simply as everyday poetry.

I'll move right along into imagery and feeling. You have a tendency throughout this piece not to stick with a particular piece of imagery, which can be a bit annoying at times, but the vast bouquet of imagery you do present all orbit mainly around the same feeling, which somewhat justifies that fact. Word choice is fairly agreeable, although I did find a few places where I think you could use some improvement.

Well! Once again, congratulations on placing first! This was quite an entertaining, if not wholly pleasant, read, and I hope know you'll keep writing.

-Kafka

Hi!!
First off, let me just say: THIS. IS. BEAUTIFUL. Seriously, it touched me so deeply. (And might I just add that I appreciated the length this time!!) I completely can relate to the third... part, I guess you would call it, the part where she heard about her fathers death. The line - "who used to swear he'd never die." THAT is what got me. My own father died from brain cancer when I was 14, but before he got sick he was the most active and healthy person I've ever known. So it wasn't so much that he used to say he was invincible, but I believed with all my heart that he was invincible. So tears literally stung my eyes when I read through that stanza. So beautiful. I have loved all of your works thus far, and I'm VERY excited to discover more.
Thank you for sharing your writing!
~Molly