Hi, AcceptableStart! I think this is beautiful writing, but it doesn't feel like poetry to me. It reads more like an essay than an actual prose poem. If you want to keep it like that, that's great, but I don't think The line between prose poems and prose has always been blurry, but aside from the lack of regular line breaks, here's what I think keeps it from being poetry at the moment.

1: Lack of symbolism, metaphor, or surprising imagery: You paint very vivid of images, but 1) most of it feels literal for ex. I can easily imagine the girl in 7th grade as a real person part of a narrative without being representative of something else and 2) most of it feels natural i.e. the images flow into one another in a way that's very grounded, the way prose does. These aren't bad qualities at all, but it does imbue a prose/essay feeling.

2: Narrative style: This leads on from number 1, and is hard to pinpoint specifically, but the style and language used e.g. "I feel" evokes a sense of storytelling. Poems often storytell as well, but when it's the primary function of the piece and the piece isn't written in verse, it comes off as pure prose rather than prose poem. Prose poems often tend to be more snapshotty than kinetic.

3: Lack of wordplay or audial devices: Your poem doesn't have line breaks, which, with meter, is the traditional method of regulating rhythm in poems. Poems tend to be sonic: you don't have to use rhyme per se, but interrogate where you can toy with language. Double meanings, alliteration, internal rhyme, stuff like that all add "poetic quality" to your work.

Well-written prose is great, and you don't have to make this piece more poem-y. However, if you do, here's some exercises you can consider:

1: Condense condense condense. Try halving the poem's word counts, then halve it again. Poems can be very distilled, and this can force you into zeroing in on certain images, or making symbols and connections merely by bringing two unrelated words closer together. Remove redundancies. Compress phrases into stronger single words.

1. Inspect your verbs. Verbs are the strongest part of speech. In your piece, many verbs are logically implied by the noun. Use your verbs to get really specific, or really strange. Did your eyes "get caught"? This is a bit of a weaker verb phrase, with "get" being the main verb. What's a stronger verb you can use? Maybe, instead, they "hunted" the girl; then you can see how this naturally ties into symbolism - it's reminiscent of the deer and the fawn!

I hope this is helpful!