Mashed Potatoes

First thing Inkwell, too many adjectives with far too many underutilized or misused images. You have pictures and meanings here which work, but the effort is undone by something which muddies the communication. I like your attempts at metaphor and entente and what not, but I get this annoyance with exactly what you want to say.

inkwell wrote:Every gaze was glued to tepid food,
or the firm phalli hidden underneath,
that chained us to our chairs,
for fear of exposure.

So I don't buy these four lines. Why? You're playing around too much with these layers and layers of information without establishing a relationship to your reader. This is inherently a male dominated poem and you feed the assumption in these lines. A pun not desired.

"gaze was glued" Reads boringly, followed by "tepid food" and I don't like your goal now. A rhyme in the line when content would have been the better focus. Showing? Oh yes, but what kind of gaze? Glued? But how glued? What glued? This is permissible in prose to be this non-direct/exact, but in poetry I want tactile knowledge for such a verb. And then you interpose the "phalli underneath" as if you are creating a hidden/double metaphor...let us find out if it works. (the last two lines add little if anything in my opinion but the attempt to play emasculation, yet you're showing/forcing again)

The awkward asphyxiation -
like pretending not to notice
parental coitus over the mashed potatoes -
made me fidget in my unforgiving seat.

Ok, please stop the alliteration. You usage of it is obnoxiously obvious. Alliteration should be an art not a science of when, where, etc.

Just look "awkward asphyxiation" with the following "pretending...not..notice...parental (coitus)" we have alliteration scrambled around with a rhyme. This might look neat, but you're paying too much time to the manufacturing of the lines. Why do I know this? "over the mashed potatoes" is just tacked on to this idea of something unwanted, say a pregnancy or some other tragedy related to phallic double entente imagery.

And the final line "made me fidget in my unforgiving seat" is again, annoying. You're skirting the edges with these adjectives and usages of alliteration when you should focus on the reader's ability to appreciate. You've barely established the idea of a seat and suddenly it's unforgiving, and the line is all about "ME...MY" so what's the relationship here? Oh right this guy is feeling awkward. Well so are we at this point, wondering why we're watching this scene.

Then came the sound of banality -
the sound of desperate, heavy forks
hammering, clambering, and screaming
against glass plates for their dear lives.

Then came a line which meant Inkwell doesn't know what to put there. Banality? You couldn't find something tactile and concrete which relates? And now forks. Hm. Again, far too much skirting. Too much veils behind veils. The efforts to make this mean something else rob it of potential.

The huge, humming grave
of soon-to-be-leftovers
loomed over everyone -
the stainless steel elephant in the room.

Same things again, and the elephant in the room is an assumption in a metaphor and colloquialism that the reader will not only get that, but has understood you will enough to see the transgression up until now. Emasculation? Pregnancy? Impotence? Crappy food? A lot of things, and this poem wants to be all of them.

I held my breath -
and counted the peas
to pass the time -
if not to pass the mashed potatoes.

Cute. That's what I see. We have one thing presented, then another, then another, then another...nothing really compounds to make this have a climax.

Look I actually like this effort, I just think for the length this is it's not developed like it ought to be. Rely less on alliteration. Rely less on enjambment. Focus more on rhythm. Focus more on the senses. You are talking about food after all, and then at the same time, aren't, but that's not the point. You have to incorporate the food or it's an albatross weighing down the entire poem. The attempt at double meanings is too obvious in my opinion.

Take a breath and look this over again and feel free to message me for any clarifications. It's not horrible, just raw, and I'm being honest when I say I like the effort. Hope this helps!

I truly enjoyed this piece. It's almost as though, In at least my perspective of course, that this is almost how some children feel when they're stuck at the table during another one of those severely awkward dinners during the holidays. A child stuck in his seat, surrounded by hypocritical family, adults that smile with pain rather than their own faces. Pretending to enjoy themselves with knives hidden behind their backs. Though to some this may seem to be fictional, you never know. Some kid this Christmas may be feeling and seeing the very this well constructed poem projects. I especially love how it ended;

I held my breath -
and counted the peas
to pass the time -
if not to pass the mashed potatoes.

Very well done!