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Hey, Lumi~

This was lovely. Like, really 'I'm-going-to-reach-into-you-and-snap-your-spine' lovely. Because snapping spines is a good thing.

I feel like there are certain areas where your poetic voice is ... weaker? than it usually is, and there are lines that could be arranged to read better instead of acting as speedbreakers where the reader is mentally jostled a little. 'all you need is to breathe' is one of those areas for me, because it's one of those lines that are meant to create a twang and cause you to twitch internally with their starkness, but that line break isn't working much for me. Maybe you could break the line at 'need' instead of 'is'? A comma before 'is' might work, too, but I dislike the pause it would create nearing the end of a line, so.

I'm going to kind of disagree with Deanie on the point of repetition: I'm fond of it and I've gone overboard with it too many times to count, but I feel like one of the best things about your poetry is your ability to deliver without repetition. I admire that. Which is why I'm tetchy about having the 'breath of dawn' and 'my breath' images so close to one another. It becomes hard to distinguish between them, like it's a tussle of 'but which is the more important image?' here.

I also think, compared to the rest of the poem, the imagery in the first stanza isn't so strong. The ideas are all pretty solid, but they feel incomplete and the linkage between them isn't all that obvious. 'work boots' and the more grounded images contrast with the intangible images of wafting breaths and clouds, and I'd like it if the imagery was a little consistent. I would /love/ some more of the 'sinking' images, and I think 'breath of dawn' is a pretty phrase, but the stanza can survive without it.

I both like and dislike the first line; it's arranged in a way that makes it look like the boy is saying 'it was an easy conversation...' rather than what's in the actual italics. Also, how is the boy important? Because he isn't mentioned elsewhere in the poem and my take on this is that the boy isn't real at all, but a part of the narrator's memory, kind of a faded reflection of themselves from a time where they weren't so vacant and drifting.

The reader is focussing on three voices: 1] the boy's voice (but it doesn't really lead to much, in the later stanzas); 2] the narrator's voice; and 3] the background ringing of the addressee. I find that 2 and 3 are the only ones I managed to connect with.

'holding your pieces together by the guts' is clunky. 'guts' is just such a stark word and it feels clumsy surrounded by all the heavy, not-so-very-physical imagery.

Moving on, in segment two, 'i collected them' is oddly vague--I can tell the narrator is talking about collecting their name/s, but it could also be linked back to collecting the menthol queens and that is something that could mess with what the poem's conveying.

I adore the last two lines in this segment.

In part three, the ending lines feel a tad off. They're verging on cliché and it's just not working for me. I think you could make more of an impact with this bit if you linked back to 'dead november' and the implications of an autumn-like atmosphere. There are so many delicious ways you could part the knowledge of the past and the future--somehow, I pictured the seat as being covered with the foliage of seasons.

I love part four. It ties everything together and it's so /raw/ and gosh it makes me ache.<3 Beautiful.

Hope this review wasn't complete rubbish. It's not easy reviewing your poetry. XD

~Pomp

Heya Lumi.

Oh. My. Goodness. What a beautiful poem <3 Like, honestly, this is one of the hardest poems I have ever had to review because without looking very much into it, I would basically change nothing. Unless you had asked me to review this I probably would've read it and liked it and not dared to write a review. But as promised, here comes the mostly-praise-i-will-try-to-be-constructive review.

First off, scratch constructive: I really really love the title. It just fits the poem so well <3

When it came to the first stanza, I had a few problems. It was actually the stanza that I liked the least because I found it the hardest to put into perspective with the rest of the poem. I'll trow my ideas out there, and then let you decide what to do with them.

The first line mentions it being about a boy who is talking while drinking tea. I know you say 'man' in the second line which would make it tricky to change it into the word man without it being repetitive, but I just felt like boy didn't seem to fit with the rest of the poem. The thoughts and feelings of the poem just sound so mature, and the relationship they have had with this person who is gone now, seems rather mature as well. Not like a childhood friend or so on. You also mention driving later which again hints at the persona of this poem being much older. So maybe 'boy' is the wrong word to use, especially in the first line because it throws the reader off and gives them the wrong impression?

I'm very picky when it comes to repetition, and you're probably gonna see that with what I say now But I really liked how in the first italics you mentioned sinking, and I feel like this could be repeated to give it some more focus. The whole sense of losing yourself like the poem is suggesting is definitely a sinking feeling, and seeing as it is so perfectly suited, I would repeat it. So maybe the next line could be altered to say 'sinking into the six a.m. breath of dawn'.

Oh, and what I really did love about the first stanza was how much you repeated the word 'breath' and 'breathe' and lungs - anything related to breathing. It kind of made me think about how even when we have nothing else, we are still living, still breathing, and if the person who the poem mentions is gone is deceased like I am imagining, then it ties into that as well ^.^

Sticking to the first stanza, at one point you say 'when my breath was across oceans / across clouds and time zones and being held in a place safer than this.' I did like the ending of the stanza in general, but I felt like the rhythm was a little bit off. I didn't really like such a close repetition of the word 'across' as well because I couldn't really pinpoint the reason for that word being of great importance to the meaning and it did stand out. So maybe for the second across think of a different word?

After the mention of clouds, I felt like we needed a pause there when reading. So in my mind the next sentence is separated from the list so that it seems to be more concluding and flows in a more natural way towards the mention of 'you' and 'me' in terms of the poem. Like so: across clouds; that's when time zones were held in a place safer than this, than you, than me.

But that's just a personal recommendation ^.^ Feel free to use it or ignore it or alter it - whatever.

The line 'or spend the nights holding your pieces together by the guts'. I liked the idea of it and imagery it created but I thought the word guts was a pretty sudden dive into more morbid diction and didn't quite match up with the rest of the poem? I'm in want of what it could be replaced with though, so I'm guessing this isn't so helpful >.>

As for the line that follows, 'the days blinking between sleep... etc' I felt like it was a bit of a rough ending on the previous line leading to this one. I know you use the word 'and' a lot in this poem, but it really does help with the flow. I'd recommend an and before the 'the' of that line as well.

The second stanza? Complete perfection <3 Not a single thing I would change or could even begin to nitpick.

You have a line 'that's where I feel your ghost strongest'. Personally, I would make that 'ghost the strongest' for the sake of rhythm and it sounds stronger to me (pun unintended ).

In terms of the stanza I really liked how you concluded the poem and everything came together. In the first line you say 'hands in my hands, acacia in my teeth?' It niggled at me because after hands in my hands, I wanted something repetitive again to match that first one. Or maybe I wanted hands in my hands to not be repetitive so it would match the latter. Either one would work, but it was the tiniest bit off the way it is now when I was reading it?

That's all I really have to say <3 I am curious to know why the persona is wondering where they will be in nine years instead of something like say, a year or ten months or just a general rounded number. But that's simply interest and nothing to do with constructive criticism. I really do love this poem and all the things I have mentioned took me a while of nitpicking to decide it was even worthy mentioning. Keep writing wonders like this, because I just love reading them ^.^

Hope this was helpful

Deanie x