Young Writers Society

Oh, wow! I love it, I love it, I love it! It's beautiful, great vocabulary, and has enough emotion in it to be a good poem. It might be a bit repetitive; but upon the topic of fire, this is almost always a problem. However, the different body parts you compared made it less repetitive.
However, I don't think this stanza is neccesary; it just lengthens the poem and is rather irrelevant to what else you are saying.
I watched the fire burn,

engulfing me inside.
I loved your ending. Very interesting! Keep writing!
Overall rating: 7.5/10

Hey, Percybeth (by the way awesome username), it's me WillowPaw1 here to give you a review! This is ganna be a short one...

I agree with Aley completely on that twist ending. It was such a surprise! A good surprise, of course, but nonetheless it was amazing. I mean, I was trying to figure how this could work with a person, and then that hole was filled with the last line.

And every glass of water

Hey! Aley here.

I really like the twist ending. For a long time while I was reading this poem I was trying to piece out exactly what sort of thing this fire represented, what could it mean that someone was burning from the inside out? Was it passion, anger, fear, pain? What could it mean? Then suddenly the fire wasn't the metaphorical part of the poem, the body was. That deserves another read in my book XD.

Still, I feel like this poem drags on a bit too long. You have some repetition in your ideas and after we get the picture of fire burning them from the inside out after the first paragraph, we don't need all of these things burned. Pick the top three, and trim back the rest. The reason I say this is because if we're going to read this again, we will want to pick up on the nuances such as "like dead leaves and broken branches" but we won't want to read through things like "I watched the fire burn,/engulfing me inside" because that's not very descriptive.

Also you need to work on your punctuation marks and sentence structure. The key thing I see you using wrong is the semi-colon. There seems to be a trend today to start with a verb in a sentence, but really that makes it a fragment. "Charring my bones." is a perfect example. This is a fragment because it doesn't have a subject. Each sentence needs a subject and a predicate.

I'll give you a couple guides you can read over in your spare time on the semi-colon, and then give a synopsis you can read over now.
Punctuation Marks
Commas vs Semi-colons
Compound Sentences
The Great Grammar Compendium

In short, a semi-colon is used to connect two independent clauses. "Boiling blisters" is not an independent clause, it is a verb, boiling, and a direct object, blisters, which just makes up a predicate of a sentence.

It's pretty easy to fix, most of the time they just need to be connected to the last sentence with a comma to make a complex sentence. Most of the time, the subject is the subject of the previous sentence and the subject would have been a pronoun like he, it, or them, which has gotten dropped in recent syntax due to chat-speak. It's really not something you can avoid, and it's something I do too sometimes without realizing it.

So in summary work on your sentence structure. Your semi-colons should probably be commas or colons, and try to cut this down a bit, get rid of some of the examples that are weaker or less explored and keep the ones that are sort of for-shadowing the twist.

Good poem.

WOW! I am loving this! I love the way you describe things like a forest, my only edit is that you might want to look at the end of the lines, does it rhyme, does it not? I'm not sure try editing that out!

Hey Percybeth! ^_^

I adored this. While it was short, it contained so much description, so much that AH I'M BURNING TO DEATH! Haha.

A few suggestions, though. There was nothing wrong with this poem, I would just like to give you some advice. In the first stanza, you put a semicolon after the first line, and then a semicolon again after the fourth line:

"With every word I spoke,

ashes flew;

burning my tongue,

disintegrating my lips."

Maybe put a semicolon after the third line and a comma after "ashes flew". It flows better and sounds more consistent. As for the second stanza, when you say, "I tried eating and eating...", take out the last "and eating" entirely. When you have both of them, it sounds like you're telling a fairy tale myth or something...I don't know. Maybe that's what you're were going for; just making you aware.

The third stanza totally blew my mind. You had so much great description in there that you actually made me feel as if I was the person, burning alive; I could see the char on my bones, the red smoldering at my fingertips, skin flaking away to nothing, blisters multiplying like cancer inside of my body. The briefness of the fourth stanza was perfect. The fifth stanza was when the ideas and themes of the poem appeared. The narrator's anger or sadness, presumably, is eating her alive, initiating the scalding sensation. No one else knows what's going on inside of her but her own mind. No one wants to touch her because they are afraid of her anger, her need for revenge; will it be contagious? Will she unleash it upon them? She feels hopeless, because she can not control this unamiable, serpentine anger that she is unable to suppress within herself. People become afraid of seeing this rage in physical form, so they leave her, hoping that she can fix herself; they are so scared of her that they lack the courageousness to embrace her.

The ending. The ending confused me, but I love it because of that. "But I was a forest." Is she just realizing that she is bigger that her anger? Or is she giving up, realizing that the fire is only going to spread? The fact that this puzzles me makes me enjoy the poem even more. Endings of poems are important; it tells you the methods in which narrator or the protagonist of the poem overcomes or does not overcome whatever is testing them (I.e. mentally, emotionally, socially, or physically). The way that you execute your ending is smart. What fun is it reading a poem if you know everything about it?

Well, Percybeth, I have to say that this was one of my favorite poems of yours. Hands down. Honestly I sort of felt like Katniss riding in that chariot with the fire suit. Except without the faux fire...sorry, my fingers just disintegrated (I'm using my nose now ).

Love ya, Percybeth!

Yours,

Sav