When the Wood Grain Danced

This is Kaos here for a review!

She swallowed down the liquid,

feeling it burn in her gut,

all the way down to her soul.

She was tired...

not the kind of tired that happens

when you don't get enough sleep--

no this kind of tired lived in her bones.

One of the first things that I noticed about this poem is that it felt like prose with the way it was styled. It confused me who "She" is and I'm wondering if this is you or if this is somebody else, because it isn't really explained in the poem. The image of the start of poem is interesting, but the wording and lines were weak here. The lines don't have much actual strength and feel awkward. For example, the first three lines. "She swallowed down" feels awkward, and it isn't exactly coherent, the second line is fine, but "all the way down to her soul" also feels awkward. She's swallowing the liquid and it sinks down to her soul, we get that much, but the wording of it weakened it.

Another thing in this poem that I didn't particularly like was the use of ellipses. It may be me and my dislike of ellipses in general, but it weakened the poem for me. It just made it more awkward and disconnected the lines from each other more than they already were.

You kind of switch tenses throughout the poem of what's going on and it gets a little confusing for the reader. It seemed to be in past tense with the reading and then at the end we see the last line "perhaps she'd get some sleep tonight" when we don't really know when /tonight/ is. This brings me back to the reader not knowing who "She" is and who this poem is really directed to, which makes it harder to interpret the message.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that it does get repetitive here and there in the poem with the excessive usage of "She" and things like that, specifically to start the lines. It would be nice to see more variety as it does get stale throughout the poem.

The poem feels like a mess to me in what it's trying to get across or do. The first thing that would help this is, I feel, creating stanzas in the poem rather than it being one large blob of words. It would help collect the thoughts better because what you have here is kind of all over the place and jumps from place to place for me. It feels like it does a bit of repeating with the theme throughout the poem of her being tired and stressed out and everything of that sort. I felt like it was very narrative-like in how it was told and I think it would help if the lines connected better to each other and were more well-equipped in that way. They should be able to easily follow each other up. It's not that the poem wasn't coherent, more that I felt that not all of it went together at the right places.

The imagery of the poem could be expanded on and strengthened which would help the poem in creating more of an atmosphere that I feel could be there. Give us the images with all the five senses. I do have to say that some of the lines were interestingly worded like "Coughing on the exhale--" and I appreciated that. The last thing that I have to mention is the use of punctuation which felt like a bit of a mess with the dashes and ellipses and that can be sorted out just so that it doesn't feel so constant or forced.

I hope I helped and have a great day!