cold front//hurricane season

hey hey! ^_^

OH THIS IS SOOOO ATMOSPHERIC

thoughts
[1] the weather imagery here is gorgeous! the whole poem feels soaked through, and it creates such a cohesive picture. we love how the person returning is treated like a natural disaster rather than just a memory.

[2] the tone is wistful, bitter, and haunted. there’s this really effective tension between childhood escape fantasies and something much darker: remember how we used to pack our bags / and pretend to run away becomes your missing posters came in like a flash flood. that shift is SO good because it makes the poem feel like the innocence is collapsing in real time.

[3] the ending is super compelling. all i have left for you are washed-out photographs-- / and it is my face that is cut out is such an eerie reversal. we expected the absent person to be the one missing from the images, but instead the narratior has been erased. VERY good final line!

suggestions
[1] some of the phrasing in the first stanza could be smoothed for clarity. the wind through the branches, snap of the twigs, / and escape of the leaves tells me has a lovely sound to it, but the subject gets a little tangled. maybe tell me instead of tells me, or slightly reworking the list, would make it flow more naturally.

[2] we love the ambiguity around what happened to this person, but the middle could maybe use one more detail. the day you stopped pretending is a great line, but it leaves us wanting just a tiny bit more. did they vanish willingly, or were they escaping something? did the narrator feel abandoned, betrayed, relieved? the poem doesn’t need to explain everything, but we felt that it was sudden compared to other aspects of the poem.

overall, this is beautiful and aching!! the storm metaphor is handled so well, and the final image is genuinely haunting. we enjoyed reading this so much!!!

~ adore

(resent because I forgot to click the yes button :') so sorry)

I don't know if you mean it intentionally, but to me I've always used hurricanes in examples of "You can never rationalize a hurrican" when it comes to someone trying to rationalize a persons thoughts and emotions.

The scenery descriptions are very additive to the emotional weight you carry in the poetry's tone It's nice that you use weather as a setting and characterization, never outright saying what a person has done.. instead letting the hurricane be the representor. Their arrival isn't comforting, there is no permission from a hurricane if it can come or go and neither does the person being addressed her. I also like your stanzas, and the way you seperate or give pauses before certain lines, it makes things like "the last time" hit way harder and have a better effect.