driving back from dinner

Hi there AvantCoffee! Niteowl here to review (and finally get my KotGR unicorn!).

Overall, I really like this. It's the sort of poem that takes a mundane moment and brings it to life, digging a little deeper to say something interesting. The end makes it feel like the speaker is trapped between childhood and adulthood-they are no longer young enough to be spellbound by the moon, and they are starting to see their parents as people, but at the same time, they're still in the backseat, not in control of their own life.

In a sleepy tunnel of full-bellied night

we follow checked light beams

and red traffic streams.

Great opening line! However, I'm not so sure about the next two. The rhyming sets up an expectation that the poem will continue to rhyme, and yet nothing else does. Perhaps that was intentional-as the speaker's life has become more complex, simple rhymes don't come as easily anymore. Or perhaps it wasn't intentional, in which case you may want to reword this so it doesn't rhyme. Though now in the time it's taken me to write this paragraph, it's grown on me.

Parents are fractured shadows

in the front. Upright impressions.

This transition to the parents is interesting. The term "fractured shadows" shows that the speaker is now seeing the parents as merely human, unlike a young child who idolizes them. Not sure the line "upright impressions" makes sense--I just don't feel like it adds anything as currently written. Maybe you need to expand on this to show why you included it, or maybe you can just cut it altogether.

My mother's ear -

a monochromatic shell;

inside it are places

I will never know.

Not much to say here-I really like this metaphor and how the speaker is coming to terms with seeing their parents in a different light.

And headphone rapping

against the bygone pane, I search the half-moon

and wonder when, precisely,

it lost its enchantment.

I want to love the ending, but the grammar and word choice are a bit odd here. I'm assuming the speaker is leaning against the window in the backseat looking at the moon with their headphones on? It's a little hard to parse out because "bygone" doesn't make any sense. The window is "belonging to an earlier time"? I'm not seeing how the word fits. I might re-word is as "My headphones rapping against the rear window pane, I search..."

Other than that, I really love this ending.

If you wanted to, you could add more details to flesh out the scene-the music playing, anything the family members say, the feeling of being crammed in the back seat with no leg room, the speaker's opinion of the restaurant. I don't know if any of that is necessary, but it could be fun to explore.

Overall, great job and keep writing!