i wonder if i invert
the path i have taken here,
to the smell of sewage and
misshapen-welts in my ears,
i will walk home,
this time, with shoes unlaced,
still recognize the sidewalk square,
shaped like minnesota-state,
but watch the mississippi fade
from the back of my hand,
until veins, are just veins,
nothing i must memorize.
who's going to get into the oven?
who's going to get drunk off vanilla extract?
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Canary word: Present
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125,024 Literary Works • 672,762 Reviews
helena? autumn? sigourney?
This is Kaos here for a review!
One of the first things that I noticed is how long the line runs on, and I don't know if you did that intentionally or not, but it hurts the flow. Instead of it all being commas, mix it up, use semicolons, end the lines. Ending the lines instead of letting it be one big blob that drags on forever. This will help give the lines dynamics, strong starts, and all the like. It becomes awkward throughout the poem and reading it, I feel it becomes stiff.
The imagery here is easily the strength of the poem. I really liked your creativity with the states and the veins but one of the things I would suggest is to let some of it develop more. I want to hear the details of it, tell us what the veins look like, tell us more about the surroundings of where the speaker is walking home. Give us more details. What you already have here is good, but I crave to hear more because it feels short and a little lackluster with the images but you can expand and it would be better than it is now. It's one of your strengths in this poem, the odd images, the ones you wouldn't really think about and it begins to create an atmosphere but never really does that in full. Tell us with all your five senses what it was like, tell us what the street tasted like. (An odd example, haha.)
The other thing that I liked about this poem was how down-to-earth it was in its tone but there was also a weakness in this. You create an atmosphere and it feels realistic but what gets lost is the theme of the poem. I don't know what I exactly got out of this. Good images should be connected to a theme, and that's something I struggled to see here. It's faint, and in the way that it doesn't really have a theme, but I want to see it brought out a little more.
I hope this helped and have a great day!
Hi!
There are a few things I don't understand. Why are random letters capitalized in the title? Then in your actual poem you don't capitalize anything, even the word I. I also don't quite follow what's going on in this poem. The description you provide is fabulous and creates a wild picture, but I don't know what the story is. Also, the last two lines don't quite belong in this poem. They are beautifully written, and they are my favorite part of this whole poem, but they disrupt the flow. How did we get from a sidewalk to an oven?
I hope this review was helpful!
Thanks for the read,
<3 rascalover