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11/17/2017 10:45:27 AM Erica Lyrick Posts: 1	Her chest cavity empty Drained carelessly, caves His brows smooth in relief Hands wandering her body Her insecurity replaced by fraudulent worship His muddy irises obscured tears refusing to spill This masked artifice Unknowingly worn Beguiles the youth Her body atop, temporarily filled bends with his breaths cheeks tarnished by water His lips brush her skin She imagines her face Empty again
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5/4/2018 8:40:24 AM Jack Webster Posts: 255	The first two lines are extremely strong. The choice of words creates a sense of a corpse being embalmed. The phrasing of the first two lines leaves all the emphasis on the verb "caves"; it is very nicely done. "His muddy irises..." is really a remarkable phrase. In the context of the poem, for me it leaves a very mixed impression; the image that comes to my mind is brown eyes painted in water color, perhaps because muddy is an adjective, -y sounding like a diminutive suffix, and irises is such a beautiful sounding word that is also used to refer to a lovely flower. It interposes a strange quality of naivety to the male character in the midst of the female character's disturbing experience. It's as if she thought his brown eyes were beautiful, until things got muddied with emotion, the way water color pigments bleed when touched with water. A different phrasing like "he looked at her with eyes made of mud." conveys an entirely different feeling, as if his soul isn't there, looking at her, but not seeing her because his eyes are blank, and mud cannot see what it is really doing. The bit about tears refusing to fall being obscured by tge muddy irises loses me conceptually. I'm assuming it is the female character's tears that are refusing to fall, but if they are not present, how can they be obscured; also, how could his eyes obscure her tears. Its taken several readings, but it seems the 3rd stanza is dependent on the last 2 lines of the previous stanza, the hiding of the tears being the mask, and he is beguiled by her stoicism? I think this point needs to have more clarity. I think stanza 3 is also unclear because of the line break in line 7. Ending with the word obscured there creates ambiguity if the obscuration exists within him for the female character or both. When stanza 4 says this mask, its not clear whose mask is being referred to. the 4th stanza ends with implied weeping which is slightly disorienting given that stanza 3 seems to say that the scene is dependent on the male character being unaware of the female character's upset? I think the closing two lines are also very strong. I think you definitely have an intuitive sense of how to use words to build emphasis and complexity. i think with more clarity your capacity for nuance will really shine.
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