i miss her

This is a beautiful poem. Drowning in nostalgia and longing. The personification of specific qualities or actions this friend has done as multiple "hers" is highly evocative and adds to this sense of pain in longing; each of those 3 special things near the beginning are so great they are described as their own seperate persons. The language of it is sweet, not deeply sorrowful, but instead basking in the sweetness of good memories. The part after "But now I long for something else:" reminisces in a less sugary register, rather a more viscerally emotional one. Something as simple as tying shoelaces is made anchor to this past relationships joy and love; that she was the one who would wait as you tied your shoelaces, but that unfortunately they are no longer here. It's simple and effective and quite depressing. It can be inferred that this relationship was one that happened a while ago when the poet was still a young child/teenager given the vivd imagery of lemonade, counting caterpillars and leaving shoes untied while playing on the pavement. This is a beautiful poem and its emotions are expressed wonderfully; it feels like it comes from a very real place.

EYES
(Looking at descriptions)
A painting of longing for a lost friend.. A vivid painting, the meaning clear.
I like how you show summer through lemonade and counting caterpillars and untied shoelaces!

EARS
(looking at dissonants because nothing is truly a mistake)
No dissonants as far as I see! (And yes I only look at spelling because I suck at other dissonants.)

HEART
(My favorite part! Saying something nice!)
I LOVE IT I LOVE IT HOW IS ALL OF YOUR POETRY SO PERFECT?
Srry it's so good that I can't describe how good it is so I'll leave it at that.. Sorry that my reviews are so useless. ..I can't come up with more to say, though there's definitely more to be said about this.. You know what, how about I give you a piece of my summer in exchange for what you showed me?
My summer is suffering. Not only are there mosquietos or however you spell it, I also can't wear my beloved waistcoats since it's too warm for that..
But my summer is, of course, also smiles. There's sun. There's, of course, lemonade! My dad's birthday. Art Fight, apparently. Ice cream.
That's my summer, for now.

Hello @cherie, this is Ares, ready to give you a review.

I don't do these often, so if you have questions or anything, just ask me in a reply!

So starting off, I like the direct title. It gives me a vibe of what the poem will center on. It seems like a reminiscence of the maternal and feminine figures in the speaker's life. It's vague, but the sentimentality is clear. The natural descriptors tie in the earthy bits of femininity in myth, like Mother Earth and Gaia, and I think that's really neat, though I don't know if it was intended. It seems like the speaker is missing either a sister figure, or a really close friend, or maybe a mentorship figure, or a daughter, even? A lady with whom they had a lot in common, who shared jokes or triumphs with the speaker. The last lines communicate a lot of longing and grief.

My main issue is that while the vagueness is reminiscent of memory, it is so foggy I can't tell who is being missed or what their true emotional impact was on the speaker's life. So, as a reader, I don't have much understanding here, and that may be intentional, but I don't know if it is. This might also be because I haven't had many feminine role models in my life, like maybe I'm just out of the loop. However, if you ever want to flesh the poem out a bit more, you could give more hints about the figures the speaker is missing, tactical or sensory examples of who these women were, and why the speaker misses them so much. I did like the numbered portions! They gave a bit of information, like I assume number one is speaking of a mother, but I don't know if the other numbered statements are about the same person or different people, and the information is too vague for an outside understanding.

My favorite lines are:

"in chaos. I miss her- many hers"

&

"a thousand times over and over; the sun
glares in my eyes and I have no one"

And I like them because they are somber and grounding. For me, these are the moments in the poem where we reach into the present, even if the present sucks. And it's super important even when we miss the past so badly and the people who are with us, to tether ourselves to the present so we can move on and help us in the now. So, in the middle and at the end of the poem, the speaker stops looking back over their shoulder and starts feeling the sun and tying their shoelaces, even if they have to face it alone, which shows the speaker is moving forward. These lines feel really cathartic to me because of that.

Uh, yeah, that's it.

Keep writing!

This is Ares signing off,
~ Kachow!

Wow
This is beautiful! I like the way you formatted the poem like a list with emotional notes. When I read it, it reminds me of my childhood and my mother. It reminds me of coming back home over festivals to be dazed by my own fantasies of characters I made in my head, of nature, of running around in that scorching heat unaware of my smelly body and sweaty little palms, just living in bliss. But as we get older we start missing more than who we used to be, we start missing people, how those people used to be, those different versions of them that only existed in that certain timeline and how our wishes and desires changes with time. Or, this could be a reflection of being naïve as a child and seeing figures of authorities completely differently from who they really are. I might be extremely off from the actual theme of the poem, but that's my person interpretation that aligns with your poem. It's just something about the way you expressed yourself through that poem that made me immediately nostalgic. I would like to know what the lines "...I have no one to pause while I tie my shoelaces" mean though.
(If my review seems messy it's cause I just woke up lol)
Anyways, that's all, keep writing ^^