Look at her!
that girl without her
face covered up, all open and
fresh, but as brown as a
dripping tea bag above
[chipped china].
Look at the dust in her eyes!
the eyes that swing tether balls
back and forth with cluttered
desperation. She has been crying and
those eyes are as red as Monopoly hotels and
[communist hearts].
Look at the sky!
and how the clouds are
cross-stitched into the wrapping paper blue
and then torn, torn, torn aside, just like
her dress.
[a summer flower print]
Look at that dress.
at how it is muddy with Coca-Cola.
look at how it wraps around her legs
(her curled up legs, smooth as
a gunslinger's draw).
[all this oily sin!]
Her prayers are strung out on the streets
like a Barrel-of-Monkeys arm in arm and
she raises her hands
to protect her cosmetics from being smudged by
stones pitched at her outside dust-sponged mosques.
[Why do you flinch at justice? at
shari'a stones?]
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139,467 Literary Works • 672,571 Reviews
I'm not sure of what to say ... I can't make heads or tails of the poem to be honest. I wan to say this is a good poem, but I can't.
There are things in brackets which I just don't understand. There are a few grammatical errors, which seem harmless because you keep consistent grammar.
Overall, I just didn't care for the poem. Perhaps, you could PM me with details I have misread or misinterpreted.
Adrian
Kylannnn!
I'm still trying to figure out the title, and if it doesn't hit me in the next hour or two, I will come back and poke you. XD Other than that, you know how to make a point, as usual--I love watching you play with language. You're a brave man, and that is a fact.
A little too brave in places, which I'll highlight:
What is red?
Why chopstick legs? This feels like less of an Asian Invasion poem and more of an anti-West--that's something you'll want to emphasize. Bringing in elements of a conflicting source is just confusing.
Prayers one-after-another like a Barrel of Monkeys is a cool image, but doing it through teeth is hard to picture. Not only is it painful, it's impossible to string monkeys through your teeth, no matter how svelte and plastic they may be. This is one instance where you'll want to split up the metaphors, or save one of them for later.
When you're working with metaphors, make sure they match up, and try not to use vulgar amounts of them in the same sentence--they're beautiful when they work as thoughts from beginning to end. When they're jumbled, they read more as nonsense than anything else.