Heyo Holi, Flite here for a review. I don't usually review poetry but given the style and format of this piece, I think it's more suited to a short story than poetry. Death is always an interesting subject to write about. I think this is more a comment than a review given the nature of this piece, it's poetic and the language is pretty. But it lacks grit, a substance. Let's analyze this stanza by stanza.
Death is what we do when we die; we lay, planted beneath handfuls of rose petals and soil. we wait for our loved ones to kiss us goodbye.
Death is indeed what we do when we die, but what does this mean? It's a pretty obvious statement, I like the second and third sentence though.
We count the water stains on our cedar skies, wall paper peeling down our decaying toes, and rusty bones.
This is indeed poetic but how does this link up with the previous stanza? What does cedar sky, wall paper peeling down and rusty bones have to do with death? The imagery does invoke a certain feeling of sorrow purely because of the word choice, but due to how disconnected it is to the previous stanza it doesn't form a larger picture.
I like your third paragraph or stanza. Though the second sentence is a tag wordy, I would either shorten it or separate it into two sentences. I think the imagery invoked in there is quite nice, it stirs up my emotions too and it links back to your first stanza.
...and chivalries abandoned in past lives.
Why chivalries, why manners? What are you trying to express here, I can see you've got the skeleton theme going on here. But saying their crinkled phalanges instead of their crinkled fingers seem somewhat out of place in a poem such as this.
The ending I feel wraps things up quite nicely, so your poem from what I've read is about two lovers in a coffin and they're thinking about what life used to be like and what life might be like afterwards. I have mixed feelings about this poem, I liked it but at the same time I also found it somewhat boring. Partially because a) not all your stanzas connected up to a larger message (of course there doesn't necessarily have to be a larger meaning). b) the language itself is not bad, in fact it is quite nice however apart from that it doesn't attribute much. Take a look at this article.
If you've got any questions, bug me.
<3
Definitely worthy of a like!
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