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10/21/2019 1:12:02 PM Laine Lubar Posts: 4	Fire like anger, wrap heat around the moist parts of me, pink membranes exposed to cold. Fire like anger, burn away the feeling of knobby fingers in tiny spaces, twisting gossamer fabric tearing silky skin. Fire like anger, cauterize my childhood, fill gaps in memory with bloated fabricated pictures of sweet childhood, darkly edged, the easy lie the willful believe. Fire like anger, shut my eyes, let me flinch from your light, your heat, away from the passion of languid bodies undulating under the summer sun, away from warm fingers slipped into mine tingling pads rubbing in secret. Fire like anger, char my useless bones, the transparent muscles under bulbous weight. Fire like anger explode, incinerate me, imprint me on the sidewalk, the shadow of me never illuminated
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10/21/2019 8:31:21 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	👏👏👏 The stanzas are well divided. They each stand alone but also paint a bigger picture together. The refrain at the beginning of each stanza is particularly effective. The ‘f’ sound in particular grows increasingly intense. In the context of fire, the refrain creates a sense of the fire spreading, continuing on from the first stanza. Your choices to place burn and shut at the end of the refrain in stanzas 2 and 4 work really well - the pause before and after each word, the plosive ‘b’, the voiced ‘t’, and choice of monosyllabic words all convey a force and intensity that could not be attained even with all caps. Your line break in line two really successfully voices a silent horror of speaking line three. The delicacy of the euphemism in line three very successfully captures a sense of innocence and or helplessness - that little bit beneath the anger, the quiet place that can only say “why?” There is a really fantastic alliterative run in stanza 2 between the b in burn and the b in knobby and o in knobby and the o in gossamer, also the t in tiny tearing and twisting. The image in stanza 5 of transparent muscles is really unique and memorable. The last two lines are also really wonderful. Might I suggest ‘The Shadow of Me’ as the title? Great write! You’re really able to grasp the use of sound to add the nonverbal element to communicate intangible parts of your poem; wonderful to read. Realize I haven’t offered much in the way of improvement; if there is something specific you would like feedback on, happy to help if I can.
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