Departing/Returning

I really love this poem Glauke! It's an exceptional piece, that portrays this really sad intimacy of a couple that for whatever reason can't seem to stay together. You've got some really clever images and language turns in here too, so let's take a look!

Form
Normally I advise for people to keep their lines even for the sake of flow, but in this case the uneveness I think communicated sort of speeding up and slowing down and I think even kind of worked with that meandering leaving and returning motif you had.

I love the nod to the departing / returning in the aligning left and right and that didn't feel gimmicky in the way that you did it. I felt like some of your capitalization choices felt a bit odd - but I think you seemed to keep consistent with them - in capitalizing even mid-sentence after stanza breaks, but your stanza breaks seemed kind of odd I guess, and I'm wondering if maybe you wanted that inentionally to feel a bit disjointed / disconnected to kind of mimic the feel of what the speaker was going through?

My very favorite section of lines was in the first stanza

Showering in the dark, one song looping,
your fingers through my hair,

Reaching out for the warm slick of your skin
through our fogged breath.

I love that you could almost read the word "looping" with the phrase "looping your fingers through my hair" and the motif certainly I think implies physical intimacy even if you don't down-right say it. Which is later parallelled in the last stanza with the "reaching out in the dark" I loved the parallelism you used all the way through with the continued shower / reaching / closeness / farness / separation themes being repeated multiple times in addition to other themes and words. That created a great sense of continuity that also I think showed a same-ness that even when the speaker and their lover were apart there was still a sense that it was all the same, that they couldn't escape the love /relationship - as the line in the last section says "This is the way we will always be".

Theme
Overall the theme seemed to be that the speaker is remembering a very intense relationship they've had with someone who has now left them, they can't escape each other though (either physically or through memories) and continue to return to each other. One thing I wondered was if the "subject" of their love isn't intended to be referring to one person in particular but actually just everyone who's in love / trying to enter and leave relationships - it wasn't clear to me in the last stanza if the speaker was mourning a specific singular relationship or just like the idea of relationships in general that we're all involved in these parallels lives we can't escape of departing and returning.

I kind of am leaning towards thinking you meant a singular relationship, but the second idea is pretty poetic, so might be worth exploring in another poem if that's not what you meant in this one.

Suggestion
I felt like one of the real strengths of this poem is how you were able to kind of dance around the physical intimacy of the piece without down-right saying it, in some way to me that makes the poem feel more elevated and maybe even more intimate because it's just something implied rather than shown. I felt like that third section with the left aligned section may have felt a little overly-innuendoed to me though? Ha, I don't know if that makes sense, and that may just be a personal preference that I thought that section felt a little too clearly sexual I guess.

I think it's interesting that throughout the poem you are talking about emotions but through the lens of just sensory imagery - that is really tricky to paint a picture of longing, loneliness, and love through just sensory imagery rather than like internal dialogue but you do it well. I felt like this worked throughout the piece, though in section two (the aligned right section) I felt like there was a bit of lack of feeling than from the other sections, I'm not sure how this would be remedied, but there didn't seem to be as much imaginativeness or even concreteness to it as the other sections, that might be one you want to add another image too.

Compliments
Yeah I really don't have a lot of criticism for this, just like minor preference things.

Overall this is really polished and communicates emotion in a really really unique way. The idea of partners leaving has been explored in a gazillion poems of course, but juxtaposed with this idea of them leaving but never being able to fully leave, and then with this whole shower motif you create a really interesting reading experience and make this whole theme your own. The poem itself is succinct and to the point, but it really packs a punch.

Your phrasing also is excellent at ballancing both action and description, which is a great technique to do where you pack an image with something moving or happening, but also a visual or sensory descriptor. For instance the phrase "reverberating closeness, this reaching out in the dark" is just wow; really cutting with this ironic twist of closeness and farness / inability to hold on to.

I notice that this poem has a few familiar images as from your absolution poem, like the papayas! And I kind of like seeing those former images reimagined and used again.

That's about all I've got! If you wanted feedback on something I missed, please reach out, this is a terrific poem I hope to read more of your work very soon.

~ alliyah