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1/25/2020 12:58:20 PM Jennifer Cahill Posts: 13	A sketch of the shades of midnight, a figure emerges, her spectre arms reach like the charcoal bones of the wild, the webbed trees. Their silhouette absorbed into the night clasp the edge of the curved slice of moon, cocaine colored and as potent. For ancient stories are spun within its orbit. It is a black and white rock that once had oceans, the orb created by a long ago planet colliding with Earth. A diabolical world pushes against our mortal micracosm, molded flesh within the cloak shaped to kill, and shed. Stripped of this armour, we meld into death, a viscous void of the sublime intensity beating, a puissance, zoetic. Hue of a collapsed white dwarf, the distant plum red throb that emits heat, burns. To die is like chalk rubbed into pores; the suck of Black Holes. Human colors drowned. edited by jacc123 on 1/25/2020 edited by jacc123 on 1/25/2020 -- Jennifer Cahill
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1/27/2020 2:02:50 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	Love it! Favorite line is “shaped to kill, and shed”. Lovely regularity of stress; lovely symmetry of the “sh” sound; fun transposition of of vowel sounds from “a” to “e”, and “pd” to “d”; creates a very pleasurable sense of completeness within the line. I think your three strongest images are the charcoal bones, the moon as cocaine, the distant plum red throb. Unexpected images, attention grabbing, unique enough to convey a sense of communicating an authentic experience or perception. I think the first stanza needs to be stronger. It feels like you were exploring a way to enter the poem, but don’t really hit it till charcoal bones. It’s not clear if the sketch is literal or figurative. Your poem has a wonderful ommision of first person language, and this is one of the strongest aspects of its voice, however you could insert a first person moment in the first stanza simply to enter the poem, then drop first person once the poem is entered: I sketch the shades... I would suggest changing ‘webbed trees’ to ‘web of trees’. Literally, webbed trees would like duck’s feet, but you’re literally describing a web, a web that happens to be made of trees. If you diagram the phrase, the way you have it originally ‘trees’ is the noun, with webbed hanging as the adjective; the proposed change makes web the noun, with a little prepositional jaunt. I would change ‘colored and as potent’ to ‘white and potent’, the brevity and severity of the line and the color white being synergistic with its potency. I think the phrase that begins with ‘Their silhouettes...’ needs parenthetical commas around ‘... ,absorbed... night, ...’ to avoid ‘night clasp’ from reading as a compound noun. (I was confused was a ‘night clasp’ was, and for a moment thought the clause had no verb.) I would switch your placements for ‘planet’ and ‘world’, both for thematic reasons and sonic reasons. A world can be something figurative as well as literal; a world colliding with earth could mean someone else’s world colliding with the persona’s Earth, which subtlety ties into to the idea of cocaine and escaping trauma. Also the vowel sound in world has a nice assonance with earth, whereas planet has a nice consonance with pushes. Microcosm might be literally correct to what you intended to mean, but also experiment with using the word macrocosm. The imagery you are using is very much larger than life; an existential scale. Macrocosm might be ironic when speaking about the life of one person, but it is not ironic to the theme that is larger than one person. You might also consider kenning macrocosm and mortal and moving flesh up a line: ... the diabolical planet pushes against our mortal macrocosm-mold flesh, within the cloak shaped to kill... Puissance and Zoetic I have mixed feelings about. Good vocabulary words, but just make sure they are in keeping with your intended audience. I would remove the last stanza. Hope my feedback was helpful. Good luck!
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