Young Writers Society

Death wish and paranoia, but existential contentment. Freaking teenage poets.

The maybes and the definite outcomes are obvious contrasts between the inner mind and outer world, but I do like the mesh of imagery that melds into gems liiiike:

the Sebring could flip out of control
and the sky would bleed
gasoline and glass.

Paranoid imagery is always fun and horrific and delicious. I love it. Visceral and almost unreal to the point of the narrator dictating from outside the vehicle. I dunno. The scene plays out further than the words give boundaries. It's nice.

"Soft white" as a descriptor is weak and garbage compared to the remainder of your material. Figure it out.

The remainder is lovely and realistic, apropos for your style and voice, but the maybes are cumbersome. Experiment with the areas of indefinite storytelling and see if there's a smoother way of introducing those thoughts? I think you'd be pleased with the outcome.

Thoughts for thought,
Ty

This is Kaos here for a review!

Idle hands covered in acrylic paint
will paint a dog riding a skateboard
in the school parking lot,
the only light source are the
lamps scheduled to set off
in five minutes.

This is a strong starting stanza, and I think that there only a few things that could be changed to improve it. I suggest putting a period at the end of line three instead of a comma, and I felt like there was a lack of punctuation here, but that and maybe a comma after the first line is all you really need. The other thing I suggest is expanding on the lamps or redefining the lamps. Do you call the streetlights lamps there, or are they literal lamps? I felt as if this was a little confusing. I also felt as if it's debatable whether this adds anything to the theme of the poem, but it does set up with the imagery. I just didn't really find anything more to think about than what's already here, but I don't think that was the purpose of the stanza. If it was, then the meaning needs to be more clear? Yeah.

Maybe they'll prepare a ham sandwich afterwards,
write a poem about how the Cubs will win in five
or how everything in this world is beautiful
even if the only thing they want to do
is go speeding down 395 and cause
a six vehicle crash with only five survivors.

This stanza kind of jumps from place to place and I think that's what you were aiming for but to fit this all into one stanza made it kind of awkward. Because at first we're talking about a ham sandwich and then the Cubs and then a car crash. Another thought that was brought up in my mind is that the poem is being told with a "they" in it which I assume is a group of people but it isn't really defined who "they" are. The last three lines made me wonder if they wanted to cause a five vehicle crash to only injure one of the people in the group but it may be referencing something else that I don't know or think about. In the first stanza it isn't exactly pointed out or clear that this is a group and I was thinking that maybe the idle hands were the speaker's, but maybe not.

Soft white hands will death grip the wheel
to prevent swerving in between lanes
with full awareness that it could happen,
that the Sebring could flip out of control
and the sky would bleed
gasoline and glass.

It comes to the next stanza and we're still on driving, which is a weird pacing change. Here I also felt there was a lack of punctuation and it's generally just not there. I don't know if this was a choice of yours or if it wasn't noticed but for me it makes the flow more iffy. The stanza here feels awkward because the third and fourth lines don't really connect with "that it could happen" and "that the Sebring" being right after each other. I suggest either adding punctuation around there or rewording it. The image made at the end of the stanza is really nice here, so I give you props.

Maybe the wheels will remain straight
and drive forty miles north,
find that one cool bookstore in Reno
and read a book about third wave feminism.
The book will be bought for 9.96
because the hands still have
three hundred more pages to go.

The first four lines in this stanza feel awkward, specifically the shift from line two to line three with the starting back up with "find that". It just feels like it's dragging on when it doesn't need to be and it could be a new line that starts differently. I also think that your choice to start with "Maybe" is odd, and I think it has a hard time of connecting to the stanza before it because of it. "Maybe" what, exactly? I'm thinking that maybe if they didn't crash or didn't decide to, but we also don't know quite whom would drive to read a book about third wave feminism.

Impatient hands will write
"Women's Arm Wrestling
Champion Of The World,
Ernest Hemingway!"
in Dollar Store chalk
on the school playground,
with hope that this trend
will continue for a long time.

I like the connection with the first stanza and the last stanza of chalk. It does a good job of connecting the two with it, but I didn't really feel that for the rest of the poem. Maybe I just didn't exactly get it or didn't get all of the references enough, but some of the stanzas didn't really connect for me. They all felt like individual trees that were too scattered to be called a forest. They didn't create a theme, at least for me. I had myself asking a bit, "What was the point of this?" here and there, but that might be just me. The theme just didn't come together for me though subtly they connected like the parking lot and driving and the chalk.

I hope this helped and have a great day!