her footsteps knock on slanting hardwood floor.
i take a step, rip open closet, tear
the dry-cleaning off hangers, empty drawers
of color, fling them at her gaping stare.
see this is what we are now. coffee, black,
with sugar. easy smiles, brushing eyes
and fingertips. our bodies notched, slid back
to shoulder blade. collisions, pecked goodbyes.
the worn routines of restless helplessness
we once called life. unbroken silence stuffed
with empty words. as if our carelessness
could smother caustic memory, could snuff
out sparks of smoldering, unsettled thought.
we almost pulled it off. entranced, forgot.
Author notes
senior english.
all critiques welcomed!
(december 2006)
Comments
1 - 9 of 9
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Talent and skill you have in abundance. I am blown away.
Thank you. Thank you for writing. Do it for as long as you can. You have a gift. You really should be published -- this is just too good not to share with a world full of mediocrity.
Garrison
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I'd love to know what your English teacher thought of this...
I'm certain mine would have been ecstatic had I written anything even close to this at that age.
I agree very much with frownsnfreckles - you do have an excellent control of your words.
I love the style you used, lines flowing into one another, often chopped up with periods (can't think of a way to describe that better right now - I'm exhausted from writing a book report on a Chinese literature classic, ugh).
Seriously, I'm wondering how I missed you all this time! I just love it! -
excellent control of words and imagery here suggesting a controlled anger becoming cold and set. 'as if our carelessness could smother caustic memory' very strong emotional pitch at the sense of a false front breaking down
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Excellent. You create an apt idiom and carry it through to the end, making it clear that such trivialities as capitalization, sentence fragments, stanza breaks are purposefully irrelevant in this sonnet. One suggestion, though: since you chose not to use the expected articles before "hollow, slanting floor" or "closet," it seems abrupt to find "the" suddenly in front of "dry-cleaning." Not wrong, just jarring. Perhaps something like "tear/dry-cleaning off stiff hangers." Put the needed syllable in later, where it can carry lexical meaning as well as grammatical. The other "the" in line 7 might also be displaced for a meaning-bearing word elsewhere in the line.
Quibbles, quibbles.
For a senior English assignment, this is remarkably well done. I rarely received anything quite as polished or as idiosyncratic from my college Creative Writing majors. Congratulations.
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This is so simple but yet it's very raw.
I like the feeling I get from it.
I think if you capitalize the beginning lines and "I's" it will look cleaner.
"entranced, forgot"
Should it be forgotten?
The whole second stanza is wonderful but I particularly love,
"ee this is what we are now. coffee, black,
with sugar. easy smiles, brushing eyes
and fingertips."
Perfection!
It reminds me a lot about my poetry based on society.
Particularly Femme Fatale.
Great job <3 -
I like your sonnet, and how you diverge from the meter once in a while (I assume on purpose, or maybe I am speaking it wrong
). But anyway, this is very creative - the phrasing really creates the right attitude for this poem.
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Sonnet?
The imagery associated with the women is especially powerful- the 'gaping' stare, 'empty' words; that concept of a void runs wonderfully through the undertones of the poem.
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i have no idea what form you refer to, but i did enjoy the write. maybe i do have the worst perception in the world, but one of the things i pull from this is the repetition in life... which gets me thinking about forgotten dreams in a way, but that's just my thoughts. however i get the feeling many things can be pulled from this, even in the relationship category?
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Shakespearean sonnet? If I'm right, I don't want points. I might be wrong. I just guessed from the meter and rhyme scheme with 14 lines. To me, this poem reads the story of a marriage breaking up. For some reason, the "forgot" instead of "forgotten" at the end makes the whole poem more respectable. Just something detached about the word that pulls together the whole acceptance of "this is what we are now." The easy smiles part threw me off, though, because I couldn't place it in relation to the rest of the imagery. Great write and consistent form, whatever style it was you were really attempting. I don't know many forms.
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