Her queries are like a right hook;
the end of a question mark.
Piercing through my spine
and pulling me closer to her.
Doing figure-eights in the dirt,
ice skates sinking into the ground.
The earth wrapping hands
around my ankles.
Take my body apart
without a manual.
Set my bones in between the nooks of the
dishwasher rack.
The water dripping down my fingers and toes,
though my rib cage can't be washed of my malice.
An unsteady beat in my ears
tells as to why my heartbeat
will never play percussion.
Heart rumbling in my chest;
a phone on vibrate.
Ringtones disabled
distorting what I really mean
into gentle vibrations.
Dirt excavating underneath my fingernails,
a garden establishing itself beneath them.
The weather eroding at my fingertips
until there is nothing but bone.
Eyes feeling like they've been pumping iron,
lifting the distorted crescent moons under my eyes
over strained shoulders.
My stomach is eating itself
and I hope that I am enough.
I'll reach for the stars
stretching a hand outwards
to pretend that I've touched them.
NOTE: I hate this poem so don't really expect it to be one of my better ones.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,805 Reviews
Hello.
This is an interesting piece. And I know the word "interesting" makes people ask what type, and it can be seen as negative, but I mean it in the sense there's something here, it's just caught up in a spider web without a clear thread between them.
This could be my own bias speaking— it probably is— but I like poems to have something that connects them. This piece has some sort of thread that I like, but I feel that the opening stanza, while lovely, is the main outlier. It's the only one that references another person so directly acting upon the narrator, and "she" doesn't show up again. As a result, the narrative thread is broken.
I do like the concept you present of others being a right hook, but it just doesn't really fit with the rest of the "self"-ness of the poem.
My favourite pieces are the ones where the narrator and world interact, namely three, four, six, and seven. There is a direct action and reaction and emotion within those, which is something I feel is missing from the passiveness of other stanzas. I like poems to have a sense of action, because then there's just a tiny grain of conflict between dreams and reality.
All in all, not bad. Some haunting moments, some forgettable moments, but there's promise here.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
Thanks for the review!
Okay, well, even after reviewing a couple poems this month I still feel really rusty, but I’ll see what I can do here.
I thought you had great imagery and figurative language. These are some of my favorites.
I’m not sure what your beef was with this poem or if you weren’t sure why you thought it was awful, but my thought is the sound of it when it’s read. You’ve got lines and stanzas of mostly more or less the same length, which is fine, but then you have a period every two or three lines, at the end of the line, and very little of other kinds of punctuation. Plus most of the verbs are –ing verbs, so they all start to sound the same. So even though the language is beautiful, the poem sounded monotonous to me because of the regular periods and so many –ing verbs.
For example, this stanza.
You have four lines of roughly the same length, with a period every two lines. That’s pretty standard for this poem. Then you have four verbs: excavating, establishing, eroding, is. The first three all end in –ing.
(Side note: “eroding at” struck me weird, as “eroding” is usually used without prepositions. i.e. “the wind erodes the rock” or whatever. Technically it’s probably not wrong, though, so if you did this on purpose for the sound, that’s fine.)
It’s not like you need to have wildly varied sentences, but I feel like playing around with punctuation a little more and switch up some of your verbs. I mean, you know, not the actual verbs themselves, but just the form you used.
Finally, this line.
“Tells as to why” also struck me oddly. Deleting “as to” would fix this.
So I don’t know if any of those changes will help you feel better about this poem, but those are the things I picked up.
Thanks for the review!