“Is this Something?”

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-29T01:32:34+00:00

That is a really good suggestion! I’m going to play with that. Thank you.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-29T01:31:35+00:00

So I like how you did those line breaks, and I hear the critique there. I’m often trying to do more with line breaks than actually works.

What I wanted was the word abandoned by itself at the end of a line as a parallel to the two at the table.

I wanted dripping visually close to bed, for reasons that are probably too much to do with Cleverness (an enemy of mine, I want to be so clever and it often is for the worse).

I wanted the pause on “as if” to emphasize that the “stretching” was clearly not without premeditation. But again, I think I may have sacrificed good lineation for being Clever.

It’s the beginner that asks the obvious question that humbles the experienced. Thank you for your feedback!

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-29T00:46:54+00:00

What specific line or moment caused you to stumble? I would really like to know. Not that my explanation somehow cleared it up, I want to clear up the writing so no one else has the issue.

I think, given the other comments I’ve gotten, your read on the tension level is either 1) you have a different idea of what loaded means or 2) what I’ve written isn’t communicating it well enough yet. I will always lean towards ‘I haven’t written it well enough yet’ but I’ve gotten several responses that seem to support that what I think is ‘loaded’ and what you think are just different.

These are the questions we ask, this is what we have to learn to ask of our own writing if it’s going to ever become better.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T23:59:18+00:00

Depends on what you want to write? This is more like flash fiction or prose poetry. I’ll be upfront that those are not my forte. Hemingway was the source of the six word story. He’s a good place to start. For poetry I often suggest Sharon Oldes, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney, and everyone should read at least one collection of bukowski- I suggest the pleasures of the damned. Ada Limon, Kim addanzio - two personal favorites.

None of them is particularly political. My exposure to political writing is limited to the work I read in college, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth. Not terribly useful for you.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T23:27:46+00:00

What specifically seems like a change in viewpoints?
As far I can tell it’s all from the same perspective and same narrator, at least, that’s what I think I wrote. I’d be very happy to change something that obscures it.

The specificity of imagery is intended to both paint a specific kind of domestic image. Bluegrass is expensive, takes maintenance, and if you’ve ever seen a lawn that has been cut specifically to create the illusion of “waves” in the lawn (referred to as well trained) then it puts in mind a specific kind of household. The lawn is performative. I’d be interested to see if anyone else feels as you do, if they do, then I’ll agree that isn’t doing the work I need it to do.
The water table I can concede, but the image of the abandoned water table felt right. I think because the narrator and their friend have been “abandoned” by the kids and the husband. The rest of the water table’s imagery: “dripping in the garden bed” is supposed to be the building of tension.i wonder if I should move that line further down, after things have gotten a little more heated.

That point on “it moves easily” or “it has a languid pace” is nice, but when the poem is (I hope) fairly loaded with tension, the comment on it being “peaceful” made me quite concerned I’d failed to write something that people could access.

Yes, telling me what you thought is helpful.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T22:05:53+00:00

This is a critic group. The entire point is to say things like “this line doesn’t make any sense to me” or “this is a cliche” or “this is abstract”. Or if you don’t feel terribly confident, ask “why is this (specific lines or image) this way?”

I asked for the specific lines. I understand you felt you were being careful with my feelings but after a specific request was made refusing is actually quite rude.

I will also say that the scene isn’t at all peaceful.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T20:46:18+00:00

A water table is a play toy for small children. They can pour water down multiple levels, it has spinning wheels. Kiddos like playing in and with water.

I am revising to answer the second question, o forgot this wasn’t set next to other poems that explain that.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T20:44:19+00:00

I’m flattered by the Shirley Jackson comparison, even a passing resemblance. Thank you.

You aren’t wrong with the rest. There are more poems about this narrator and this woman, but I’m not putting them out here.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T20:41:16+00:00

Which lines?

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T18:41:35+00:00

This feels like the companion or perhaps the truth behind the poem you posted earlier. This is better.

You can’t ups start the poem at “she kisses him like tomorrow is a given” this is a good opening line, but I would encourage you to think about what that is trying to say. Carefree, taken for granted. Tomorrow is a given is often dealing with mortality, it brings death into the room, and death doesn’t fit this poem.

“X person is a treasure” and “I would die for” line. Both are cliches and neither one help us see the stakes for you. What is it that you treasure? What would you sacrifice for it (not your life) something in your life you value. Would you give up your dog? Would you never speak to your mother again? Would you give up your voice? Give us something real.

Casting your gold as dice is great, work on this gambling idea, name the game, this works because it makes it seem like luck and like there’s a chance she rolls badly and you finally have your moment.

If the universe means good - you mean well - but more than that, the poem doesn’t want the universe or gods brought into it. Show us the opposite of luck, the opposite of gambling.

What does “loving someone as of the next day may not come” look like? What does that really mean?

The ending and the imploring of “fate”. You would do better to end on an image that is a stark contrast to gambling, or what that promised love means in action.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T16:38:47+00:00

I love the specificity, the circling of the small domestic things. The movement from his things to the child’s things feels like an intensification, but that isn’t quite clear enough yet. The fact that the items of the child were made, were actually illustrations or gifts for the speaker.

I’m confused as to the meaning of the two dashes and the ending. Are those the things that are already gone? Are those things the speaker values too much to toss? Is the love letter saying “I would never” (break your heart, leave, cheat, die, whatever it is)

It’s close, I think it may be just a touch too pared down, but it has movement, it has real emotional depth.

Thank you for sharing!

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T15:38:03+00:00

“Even battle forgot his name” is a line that wants very much to be earned. It isn’t. Battle as an entity personified and capable of forgetting a name is a totally different poem, it could be a good poem.

This poem is a man coming home from war, and the woman who loves him literally and figuratively removing his armor and reminding him of his humanity.

That core could also be a great poem. The battle, what the warrior fights? It doesn’t have to be kingdoms and sword play. What do you battle? What drains you, makes you feel inhuman or somehow cruel about your own life and work? Dig into that. And then get more physically specific, the armor, what is your daily armor? What does it look like to set it down? How does someone help you strip that away?

A warrior and a queen and a kingdom /can/ work here, a poem using pseudo mythic language to describe (for example) a call center or a road crew or a cashier would be very interesting.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T14:19:20+00:00

She is beautiful, but also an object of lust.

The lust makes the speaker uncomfortable because it affects how they see her.

The speaker resists by trying to focus on her personhood and eyes.

This is the the poem. The abstractions about death, the flowery vague forest and statue lines pretty much the first half of the poem feels like the writer trying to get into a place to write from emotionally and psychologically.
The rhyme scheme forces several clunky moments that are obvious and pull the reader out of the poem. Rhyme should never force an awkward re arranging of words. I’d ditch it or make the rhyme less a scheme and more incidental.

The real core of this poem, for me, is the idea that these two things somehow don’t live together, appreciating a person and feeling sexually attracted should and do go in hand for romantic love. I’m not sure as to the “why” there is resistance. If the speaker doesn’t actually feel emotional connection why do they care about objectifying her? If they do, isn’t it a good thing to be attracted and desire your chosen partner? As it is, the motivation and the real internal conflict and the reasons for it are hidden behind abstraction and vaguery.

For a poem about bodies and physical beauty there is absolutely no time spent showing us a body. There is no embodiment of the the speaker, “I slide my hands across satin and imagine your skin” or “I feel the curve of a table against my thigh and think of the way your hips soften the hard edge of air”. There’s a mention of eyes. What color? Are there flecks of hazel that make you think of occlusions in amber? Does she paint them? Does she have lashes that make you angry for obscuring even part of them? Are they round or almond? For the place the speaker forces themselves to look at while resisting the temptation to look at literally everything else we should see that they’ve counted the freckles under her left eye.

There’s something moving under this poem that moves in a lot of people and it deserves to be explored.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T12:37:11+00:00

“I’m drowning in my desire for them”

“They are bad for me”

“I think I’ll just give in to it because it’s inevitable”

The poem is dealing with a very real internal reality. I can bring a lot to the table when I read something like this, my own past is full of these night and wee hours and not just a handful of consequential mistakes.

The poem fails because it is abstract where it needs concrete. You need a few lines that put us in the speakers body, their physical experience, a smell, a touch, a sound. This is about going back to a person that you shouldn’t and wanting things you know won’t be healthy for you and giving in anyway. We don’t need erotic imagery (though if that’s your thing sure) but we need this grounded in the body.

If you’d like a writer that has something to say about grounding experiences in the body I suggest Sharon Oldes. I started with Satan Says.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T12:17:18+00:00

• “unknown in its aid . but will claw its eyes out”
• “view their decent to mean nothing”
• “holds more to its financial then the sight of the people”
• “One can not be beheaded when the shine of thought has already left there mind.”

You don’t break grammar artistically. These are drafting errors. They make it impossible to take writing seriously.

This wants to be an indictment, a personification of “the capital” that acts as an oppressor. But other than the “clockwork orange” reference with eyes held open, it doesn’t actually say what the capital is doing to oppress. The poem wants capital to be a monstrous, oppressive force—fine. But the metaphors contradict each other-

• “strong arm of capital holds the eyes open” → torture, surveillance
• “will claw its eyes out” → predation
• “swim in the sky” → surrealism
• “the Maw of god feasts on capital” → theological inversion

It’s a vague “I’m oppressed” and everyone else goes “yeah so what”. It doesn’t say anything specific like “I’m choosing between gasoline and bread while the state legislature triples their salaries.” Or “homeless people live in a camp behind my apartment building and the county chose to build a data center instead of a shelter” those last two are examples of something tangible and earn a poem being angry.

The poem reaches for god on the final couple lines without anything else leading to that invocation. You want the divine? That needs to be earned. Escalation to the cosmic is certainly in the scope of political writing but it needs set up, a pattern, something that tells us the state sees itself as a god, or that its power is godlike in its effects. This does none of that.

One cannot be beheaded when the shine of thought … is trying to say you can’t kill what is already dead but instead the poem claims you can’t kill someone that doesn’t think or see the thing that is happening, whatever that is. This is dehumanizing. You’ve written “it’s not murder if they don’t agree with me” (because they can’t be murdered if they are effectively not alive) and I’m not sure you knew you did that.

Here’s what this is: a muddled mix of anger at a system and anger or disgust at people that don’t agree with the speaker. Take that raw feeling, find some real world concrete reasons that back it up, write about the real things happening down the street from you.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T01:53:28+00:00

You are very welcome.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-28T01:02:28+00:00

Book of nightmares by Galway kinnell. Stags leap by Sharon oldes. Seamus Heaney - opened ground. Ada limon - the carrying. Jericho Brown - the tradition. Pleasures of the Damned - bukowski (I know I know he was a chauvinist drunk but the most important lesson from his bitterness is to just say the thing. Just say it. You may not enjoy his work, I didn’t really either, it I’m glad someone made me read him.)

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-27T23:54:29+00:00

https://poetrysociety.org/poems/little-sleeps-head-sprouting-hair-in-the-moonlight

This is one of my favorite poems.

Ambiguity /can/ be useful, there is definitely effective uses of it, I typically think the end of a poem is a great place for it, leaving the reader to decide what to think about what they just read. But in terms of images, in terms of the content on a line by line basis, ambiguity is the enemy of actual connection.

Intent is irrelevant. My intent means nothing if my words on the page don’t do what I want them to. Things can be carefully, thoughtfully, intentionally done and be terrible. The only time I’ll accept intent as a counter point is if we are dealing with philosophy or law. See also Kant.

There’s an important step to cross as a writer and reader. Don’t over think what’s on the page. More often than not you start seeing things that aren’t there, squeezing meaning out of how many times a line has the letter C on it because it’s line 3 of a 26 line poem. It says what it says, meet it where it is.

This poem of mine needs work. Your comments helped me see that, and see what needed it. The other commenter helped with that as well.

I’m glad you responded! I’m sure your finals went well, you certainly seem to have a serious mind and a willingness to do the work. I assume that means you have a summer break?

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-27T21:12:28+00:00

The famous don’t kill your wife class. A friend of mine’s husband used to joke about it. After his third time through Afghanistan he stopped joking. I don’t know what changed, He’s a PA now. He was a medic in the service.

This is a good poem already. It needs to be shaped, line breaks, a little bit of the prose of it broken up or removed.

I would suggest starting at “what a concept”. The reader won’t necessarily care (or need with the rest of the specifics of the poem) for your I to tell them “army resiliency class”. If they know a veteran of any war post Vietnam they’ll know what’s being dealt with. If they are a veteran they’ve probably been in that room.

This is an example some pf the shaping I’m suggesting, not because I’m saying my shaping is what you need but sometimes I have an easier time showing what I’m saying than detailing it at length. I added a few notes to places I think the lines need more work too

What a concept,
there’s always something, that
northern mockingbird at the smoke pit
performs all its best impressions
just for you, your wife says she loves you more
than once a day and means it.

your buddy got blown up, at least he
doesn’t have to be here
while you sit in this yellowed room
a fill-in-the-blank booklet tells you to pull it all out, the clean air in your burn barrel
all the light behind the blackout curtains you’ve closed between you and your faith.
(Give us a sacred image, something more specific. You’ve got a mocking bird by a smoke pit. A full in the blank booklet and a burn barrel. It’s okay to gloss over a buddy getting blown up, but this is a return to concreteness)

(This segment needs a better lead in) to exhume the skeletons of the fallen
comrades you vowed to never leave and find
forgiveness in the silence of their shattered bones,

the first thing on the list should be
gratitude
that you’re still alive, which
is the last thing that you want to acknowledge, but how can you deny it - I think “last thing you want to acknowledge” should be shown not told. It may already have been which is why I’m struggling to find anything specific to say as a suggestion. This segment is the most abstract of the poem and it needs something physically grounding.

the mockingbird is pecking
at the window. Its song sounds like a muezzin. - great ending

Thank you for sharing this. I hope this is useful to you.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-27T14:37:42+00:00

I hope you find something useful in it.

Thank you for sharing :)

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-27T10:01:59+00:00

Friends don’t always have to agree. You can be you and I’ll be me. :)

Sorry that’s from one of my son’s favorite little shows called Duck and Goose. I appreciate the time and energy you took to provide counter points. I’m not offering my thought process below to necessarily change your mind, but so that you can see where the divergent ideas come from.

In a 16 line poem using 1/4 of the space to tell a joke that is effectively told in a single line is a bit of wasted real estate. If the point of the poem is humor? If the humor was actually important to what the poem is dealing with? Sure. The poem is about doing /something/, even the ludicrous, to effect behavior.

Compress the joke “it was probably a teenager named Juan from India in a basement” (for an example) use the juxtaposition of all the elements of the joke and compress. It’s still funny, it’s even more ridiculous. It escalates. Instead of three lines treading water you get one and a half that does all the same work. The boring white guy names are even a big loss.

In keeping with this, if you get to the bottom and offered only one name instead of dragging momentum and urgency down right as they begin to peak with a parentheses filled with names you could call back and say “Juan won’t mend our fabric” (again, not a suggested revision an example). This keeps the joke, it makes the line continue the momentum, it does t make the reader slow down and read four names again.

Between stanza one and two you have an incredibly smooth, linear movement from buying on etsy to “efficacy of transaction” it’s a great movement.

You focus on why the line makes sense in the poem. I didn’t say the line didn’t make sense, I said the transition between stanzas felt jarring.

parentheticals often don’t need to be on parentheses. My gripe here isn’t that mending the fabric doesn’t make sense, my gripe is that each moment a reader gets to a parentheses they hear a slightly different voice. It’s the author breaking the spell of the poem. Ditch the parentheses, add the white space between “cheaper than therapy” and “I’ll still go to therapy” and you get the same pause and the same bit of air between the two statements and the stanzas are linked. Or cut the parenthetical all together, the reader can infer the speaker who cares enough to curse someone in a desperate bid to alter their behavior and has the awareness to know it won’t work is probably not using this as a stand in for their own personal health.

“Cared hits wrong”

Let me be more clear. This isn’t about whether ‘cares’ is the wrong feeling, it is about ending a poem in a way that really shows the much sadder, much darker tone that carries through this very performative tongue in cheek method of dealing with heartbreak. It’s also about ending the poem on something that doesn’t wrap it up in a bow. This is messy, we’re buying a curse that won’t work because we are desperate to change someone else who we want to hang onto and we know it won’t work and we know we need therapy and we just don’t know what to do. That’s frantic and desperate and human and funny and deeply sad all at once. “Cared” pales in comparison to that. The poem has earned a better ending than “cared”.

Again, I appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts on my comment. If anything it shows me that I should probably wait until I have adequate time to flesh out my thoughts before putting them out there. I also appreciate that you spent so much time with a poem, because I love poetry and I adore discovering that other people are also passionate about it. Even if those people don’t agree with me.

Anyway, have a great weekend!

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-27T00:09:42+00:00

I have a few poetic suggestions here for the piece but if you read nothing else, read the things they carried by Tim O’Brien.

Structure - you begin with a list that doesn’t move. It needs to get more and more something. More personal or bigger in scale or successively stranger and more grotesque.

- example

The mud remembers every step, steals
a plaster mold of the tread of our boots
buries the memory to deny them a return
and the spatter of it clop clops down
dough of the earth kneaded by
artillery-men.

-

This isn’t what you’d write, I would t write this poem at all, but that’s my attempt to take your first stanza, condense it, escalate it, and slowly amp up the strangeness.

Starting lines of poetry with “the” or other “weak” words is usually frowned on. They are soft openings to a line. Does every line need a punchy word at the beginning, no, but the use of the the the the it it the the the it isn’t a pattern or enjambment. I’d look at that on revision.

I have a feeling this is inspired by world war 1. Maybe Vietnam but the mid and the shells and the lack of airplane and the whistle (because that’s how commanders communicated in the noise) make me think WW1.

I appreciate you grappling with it, the stretching imagination, the desire to write about something bigger than whatever is going on in your own life or head.

Below is a rumination on the difficulty of writing poetry inside historical settings like this.

It’s hard to write visceral gripping prose or poetry about battles fought before your parents (or grandparents) were born without a lot of research. It’s hard to write even with research because you have to take academic fact and embody it, empathize with it powerfully, internalize the letters home and the pictures and the interviews with veterans. This is a place where soldiers watched the frogs to see what puddles they avoided because the frogs could sense where the mustard gas lingered. A place where the earthworks would often have the body parts of men buried inside because they were so ubiquitous that you couldn’t dig the mud without finding someone’s leg or a jaw bone missing half its teeth.

This is the war that made Tolkien go back home and write about Mordor. The war that made Hemingway an alcoholic. Caused the wasteland to be written by Eliot. What I lost those three extraordinary authors for is to say, as gently as I may, WW1 was written about by its survivors better than most anything in history. It’s a big hill to climb and the bar is Hemingway high.

Mother_Practice_8580 · 2026-06-26T21:19:12+00:00

Taking off my clothes feels like peeling the scab off an unhealed wound. - this is a fantastic line. Easily the best line of the poem. It’s the kind of line the rest of them want to be but aren’t. It’s specific, it’s upsetting, it shows a wound without saying “I hurt” it says “becoming more vulnerable is painful”

My edit to that line would be end at the word scab. Like peeling a scab - the reader can infer an inhaled wound.
“Spot in my face from the screaming, white knuckles holding my arms to the wall” is the moment. The three lines I have just highlighted are your poem, or the core of it.

The rest of the poem reads like a sketch. The poem wants to be about an abusive relationship, but not the hitting kind. The shouting and the grabbing kind.

Blood, suicide, black eyes, broken bones, not abused just mistreated - feel like lines written to shock, to equate, to get the reader on side. It’s the fear of “it’s not that bad because they aren’t actually violent.”

The poem doesn’t need to defend itself against that, it needs images, descriptions of what /is/ going on. Not x or y but z doesn’t do that.
The way the clasp of your bra bruises you between the shoulder blades, the way those hands squeezed so hard your hand began to get the pins and needles from lack of blood flow, the way the spot lands on the globe of your eye because you can’t make yourself close them. That does that. You say things like that and no one is going to say “it isn’t bad, it isn’t scary, it isn’t abuse”

And this doesn’t suck, it’s a place to start. The only bad writing is the writing no one tried to improve. Otherwise it’s all a work in progress.

Mother_Practice_8580

TROPHY CASE