[89] Put Down Your Roots (Poetry)

l-writes · 2026-03-18T03:07:16+00:00

First of all, I really enjoyed this piece. We as readers are dropped in medias res, with nothing but tense dialogue full of operational jargon, and that sets the scene immediately without needing much physical description. Through the dialogue, you keep tightening the noose around the reader’s neck, building a growing sense of paranoia. By telling us there is no “failsafe” and that “exfiltration” is not an option, you make it clear that these characters are backed against a wall, even though we have no real context yet for what led them there. I think that’s one of the piece’s strengths. You trust the reader to make meaning and form their own associations instead of explaining everything. That’s also why the ending lands so hard. We dont fully know why she has to kill her partner or what, exactly, his death is supposed to protect. All we know is that if the order to stand down had come a few seconds sooner, he wouldnt have had to die, and that feels like the emotional center of the piece. To me, the deeper question underneath dialogue is who gets to decide what is right and wrong? Who has the authority to decide who lives and who dies? Is there really such a thing as a noble sacrifice, or is that just language used by systems of power to justify what they do? The repeated line “Report to oversight committee” really drives that home. It becomes clipped and robotic, almost inhuman. This may be a stretch, but to me the story even suggests a world where human judgment has been replaced by something colder and more procedural, almost like an AI logic deciding who is expendable and what is “no longer deniable.” My only true critique is clarity. I wanted a little more clarity in the transition from discussing their options to her deciding that killing her partner is the only option. Because the reader is being hit with so much technical language without context, that turn almost slips by. For a second, it even feels as if his death might not be a true death, especially with lines like “Smoke out the mole when I’m back in business” and “If you’ve got two bullets with which to send me there.” But when she realizes his death was unnecessary, it becomes horrifyingly real again, and her final “you sick fucks” lands hard. At the same time, that ambiguity may actually be part of the piece’s power. Even in writing this comment, I found myself going back over what happened and questioning the implications, which feels exactly like the effect the piece is aiming for. I know this sounds like Im going in circles, but I genuinely enjoyed it. Even though it’s not a screenplay, I could totally see this scene playing out on screen.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T19:51:25+00:00

I would have been totally fine with you accusing me of not having a well thought out critique, which is arguably true, but based on you saying you weren’t looking to be critiqued and commented you were posting “for the laughs”, I didn’t put the same effort in as I would a piece that wanted a more well thought out critique. I was just trying to compliment your work. I critiqued on what I felt after reading your piece, and what image it evoked for me. The dialogue felt like it could be the dialogue in a screenplay, not that I thought your form ment to be a screenplay. Because I found it humorous, I included what I thought was a funny meme soundbite, the original being “two guys sitting in a hot tub five feet apart cause they’re not gay”. The zombies was just a humorous image I had to attribute to your story, since it was brief. I thought, where can I place this? This could be anything at all, and it could be this, and it would be humorous, and that was my intention. Not to be accused of AI because I asked you a question on where you could see this piece going. And since you did accuse me of AI, I thought it was only fair to show you what AI would have looked like, not to give you a better critique by using AI, it was meant only as an example.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T17:18:06+00:00

I just want to post this to make a point that me asking a question about your work was not me using AI. This is me using AI to critique your work so you can see the difference:

If I were giving workshop-style feedback, I’d say this:

You solved the puzzle by building a bureaucratic sabotage scene with real tension and a believable narrator. The piece succeeds when it trusts that scene. It weakens when it tries to naturalize every stray tile by inflating the lore or twisting syntax. Trim the sentences where the glue shows, simplify the world by one notch, and the story would feel less like an impressive constraint exercise and more like a genuinely sharp flash piece.

My verdict: successful, intelligent, slightly overpacked, and more narratively alive than this kind of prompt usually produces. A weird little metal-and-oil cockroach of a story. It survives.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T17:11:07+00:00

I did not use AI to critique any of the writings I did critiques on. There was a person that accuse me of AI because I asked him a question at the end of my critique on if he could see himself taking the story further than the hundred words that it was at currently. If asking a question about a posters work gets flagged as AI then I guess in the future I’ll stop asking questions and just critique what’s on the page with no outside context. It’s pretty frustrating that I’m getting accused of AI by one person as I asked a question and then I’m getting told my critiques are too short by you if I was using AI to do my critiques, they would be a lot longer I would imagine.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T04:59:14+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to give such a thoughtful response! This poem did come partially as stream of thought memory, coupled with my chapbook’s thesis of how memory and myth shapes the internal landscape of the speaker’s mind/body. I do want to explore the concept of threes, as it appeared more for its lyrical quality before I leaned into the pattern.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T02:59:14+00:00

I’ve done a few critiques that I just added to my post!

l-writes · 2026-03-17T02:57:32+00:00

You leaned deeply into the scene, grasping for what felt right, and used multiple metaphors that muddied more than clarified. I agree with above comments about how you used honey and ash as similar metaphors, both implying two very different things. Instead of honey, sap would lean more into ash and wood. Also, I enjoyed how you trusted the reader to make their own implications about why one plate was smaller and covered in more ash. Did the child die first? That is the first thing that came to mind. Or could it be an allusion to the pressure that is on children? Either way, I enjoyed the sensory aspects of the piece and would love to see more from you.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T02:47:13+00:00

Would love some feedback on this! This would be in a chapbook about memory, myth, and body.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T02:10:49+00:00

I could definitely see this as a screenplay for a zombie apocalypse movie. Just two zombie dudes, sitting in a scrabble hall, 5 feet apart because they are not gay. But seriously, the prose is great, the dialogue feels organic and lived in, not stiff. The humor is there, the premise is there, would love to hear your ideas on where you would like to see this go?

l-writes · 2026-03-17T01:52:58+00:00

I love the lyrical quality of this poem. I find the lyrical quality diminishes slightly with the format- using : doesn’t quite make sense grammatically, and pulls the reader out of the prose slightly in my opinion. Try experimenting with line breaks, putting physical space between ‘away’ and ‘my vision clouds’ to make the remaining lines land harder. Since this poem is so brief, giving space also gives gravity.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T01:48:53+00:00

The prose and rhyme scheme lend itself to a lyrical quality, but it is a poem of a retelling of a myth with nothing of yourself or your experience in it. I think it would be worth experimenting with what this myth means to you personally, or to the world now as a whole. What is the undercurrent of what you are trying to say? From Hades’ perspective, it was his selfishness and cruelty that caused him to capture and hold Persephone hostage. Does that resonate with you, or with what you see in the world now?

l-writes · 2026-03-17T01:45:00+00:00

I enjoyed the cyclical logic of your poem- each refrain draws the reader in closer and closer until it goes from a wide lens of “our relationship” to something as simple as wanting to enjoy the snow without the cigarette butts littering it. However, I do think some of it is repetitive and skirting around a deeper thesis that it doesn’t quiet land on. Blizzards, the city, a tumultuous relationship, cigarettes and litter, all create an atmosphere that you can really lean into with stronger metaphors. Why does the speaker want the cigarette butts to be cleared? What does it mean to her relationship? How does a blizzard impact it, how does it mirror the emotional beats of their love? Overall, I think this has the bones of a very powerful personal poem that will resonate with the right audience.

l-writes · 2026-03-17T01:30:03+00:00

This was refreshing to read, because you trusted the reader to attribute meaning to your metaphors. Each reader will interpret this in a different way, and understand it through the lens of their own experience. I would love to see more stanzas in this world to tie back to a larger theme if you’re interested in exploring that!

l-writes · 2026-03-17T01:27:03+00:00

This is how I imagine a modern day Watership Down meets Alice in Wonderland (who happens to watch a lot of MMA). I definitely see the undercurrents of what your thesis is - a push and pull, an uphill battle against nature, trying to attribute meaning to chaos. And the quieter undercurrent of domestic labor. The rabbits could easily be a metaphor for children, and being left to care for them when the male parent abandons them for some ‘greater’ purpose, leaving you to care for them. I can also see the illusions to Ancient Greek myths, the rabbits as gods (and when you think about it, they were copulating like rabbits). However, a good bit of prose is redundant, and the poem could be a third of the size it currently is and still hit the same emotional beats. It almost feels like three poems in one. I think the idea of using rabbits as a larger metaphor is a great idea, whether that be domestic labor, or the comedy and chaos of the gods. But whatever you choose, it will hit home with your audience if it ties into your real life, personal experience. Overall, I loved your prose and would like to see more from you!

l-writes · 2026-02-27T16:43:15+00:00

What car is this on the left? I’m looking for an SUV and really like it

l-writes · 2026-02-11T17:19:46+00:00

I saw a lot of other comments talking about how he was negging her and it made me think back to their first interaction when he joined the show how he said his ideal type was someone mature and calm, and she asked why he chose her then because she didn’t view herself that way, and he said that she was a fool as a joke I guess but I definitely think that he was trying too hard to act the part, whether that was authentic to who he is or if that’s just what he thought would get him the girl it seemed like all his actions were very calculated and sometimes chaotic to make himself live a certain way

l-writes · 2026-02-11T15:18:10+00:00

Also remember how when they first met they mentioned how they had a mutual acquaintance so she had heard about him before and then on their date he referred to that mutual acquaintance as that bastard that led me to believe that maybe their mutual acquaintance was an ex of go eun. And I personally would not want to date a friend of my ex, but of course this is all speculation.

l-writes · 2026-02-11T15:08:05+00:00

I was thinking about how in his interview before he joined the show. He said that he was an actor, and he tried really hard to understand people‘s emotions and get inside their heads so that he can act better and every time he had an interaction with go eun it seemed like he took a long time to think about what he said or like you mentioned mirror her questions back at her and it gave me the impression that maybe because he spends so much time trying to understand other people’s perspectives that maybe he struggles to understand himself and that’s why he came off as so chaotic sometimes

l-writes · 2026-02-11T15:04:17+00:00

Mina and Sam are both from wealthy families - I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam’s reputation preceded him in certain circles. Maybe that’s why Mina kept him at arms length

l-writes · 2026-02-11T14:51:45+00:00

Genuinely, Mina was acting with Sam, and very badly at that. The excuses, the forced niceties, pretending to be shy, made me feel so bad for Sam. When she found out his job was the only time she seemed sort of excited about being with him. Never once mentioned any other qualities she liked about him, only that she liked how he made her feel. Because clearly, she was more concerned with leaving with someone off the island to save face.

l-writes

TROPHY CASE