She
breathes, a city set ablaze,
like she’s
Chicago, ‘71,
a flame is
licking through her lungs;
she hacks
her heart up in a haze.
Her brow is
burning up my hand.
Her mouth is
like a droughted river's.
Despite this
heat, I watch her shiver
and feel a
chill from where I stand.
The room is
draped in smells of sick--
I see them,
heavy, hanging there.
She pleads
for Pastor Baudelaire
in downtown
Old Saint Patrick's.
I check my
watch, but now is not the time.
But no,
she’s like a muddy sea.
Her
deathbed’s bloated, stinking, wet.
Her skin’s a
swamp of dripping sweat,
like how
Chicago used to be.
She takes
another phlegmy breath
and lets it
out, a drippy rasp.
It seems
she’s in an evil grasp.
Her lungs
are filled with liquid death.
I check my
watch, but now is not the time.
Though
bub’ling, boiling, wracked with chill,
and though
she’s lost to current thought,
she writes a
sonnet on the clock.
She’s
writhing, yet she lies so still.
Still
writhing, and she’s writhing still.
And when the
time at last will come,
this stolid
watcher won’t succumb.
I won’t
allow my eyes to fill
with burning
water fit to kill,
that turned
her face this shade of mauve,
that turned
all things Ce n'est pas grave,
that drowned
her from inside for nil.
I check my
watch,
I check my
watch.
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139,463 Literary Works • 672,569 Reviews
FORT HOLY COW
You know how much I hate rhyme schemes, but this is so good it's like cream cheese on banana bread. Your meter is what makes it. In the first stanza, I didn't even realize there was a rhyme scheme until river/shiver. That's good. That means that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. It aids the poem. I feel like that's rare these days.
How do you do it? Dang, son.
My dude, I love how you say '71. This gives us a setting because you're referring of course to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which means this is way before 1971 because otherwise '71 would refer to 1971. Bless your subtle setting hints.
There's only a few things that I'd consider changing about this piece.
While the rhythm is still good here, I don't feel like the full stops at the end of each line are working too well. It's a little jarring where I feel there should be continuing momentum. While it's not strict repetition, there is some here in the way the sentences are structured, and I think it just is a little too much in this section. I suggest changing the structure or punctuation here to give this bit a little more breathing room.
This is the only line that felt forced at all. It's really not that bad, but because the rest of the poem is so well done, it sticks out to me. Such a direct rhyme between rasp and grasp doesn't feel right here. I would change it to something with more of a slant rhyme. Past or passed might be a good one. Not sure what you would say with those, but you get the idea.
You do the full stop thing again in this section. I'm starting to think it was a stylistic choice. I get it, but I still think it should flow into each other a little more smoothly. I think it would shift the tone of the poem from something strictly angry to something a little more tender. Because I feel like the narrator is kind of removed from the subject of the poem until the end where the narrator pledges that they will not cry. A more legato style earlier in the poem might make the emotions of the narrator clearer.
This was kind of a short review, but I hope that my critique helps. I'm going to disappear again now. Bye, fort! It was nice to read your stuff again! I really like what you're doing here!
This is an interesting work. The imagery you use is very vivid, making it easy for the readers to insert themselves into the scene. The emotions are conveyed well, too. The kind of... not splintered language, but wandering language, I guess, that jumps from thought to thought makes it rather clear that the narrator is in a certain mood. I am personally not good at naming emotions when I see them, but I think here it’s kind of a mixture of panic, exhaustion, worry, and maybe even a little bit of failure/guilt. Helplessness, maybe, is the term I’m looking for? I don’t know, whatever the proper name is, you’ve done an incredible job of conveying it. The repeating line about the watch seems to indicate that it’s only a matter of time before the sick loved one (I assume loved one) passes. Now, normally, that would be a cause for sorrow, but the rest of the poem clearly indicates that the person is suffering, and it all ties together to seem like the narrator wants the person to live, but also wants their suffering to cease.
I mainly went over all of that because, at least for me as a writer, sometimes what you want to get across, doesn’t end up getting across, and the best way to fix that is to find out if the readers picked up on it.
I didn’t notice any grammar or spelling mistakes, so you’re probably good on that front. Good luck with the writing process! (Because no matter where you are in it, luck is always nice!)