Young Writers Society

She sits in the filthy bath-water, rocking back and forth.
She looks at her naked body, shining with drops of sweat.
Her mind runs blank as she hears his footsteps becoming louder
and louder as he drifts closer
and closer.

He flows along the ground, shimmery and smooth as mercury.
The bringer of freedom glides over to her door of flesh.
He lingers above the skin, waiting for the right moment.

"Knock knock," he whispers as he taps on the knob.

She knows who it is, she sees him every day.

Almost routinely, she gets up and looks through the peep-hole.

He stares back at her, rosy lips pulled back over white teeth.
His smile cradles her and his eyes stream hope into her soul.

She steps back from the door, clenching her fists, but then relaxing them.

"Who is it?" she breathes, a voice like honey.

She's not scared.
She's soothed, at peace.

Before he can reply, she makes up her mind and says her last words.

"Come in."

Right as those words depart from her lungs, she slips away, losing all touch with reality.
With life.

Her body melts into a crimson red, becoming one with the water.

He closes his eyes and falls through her, the flickering light from the single bulb above them glimmers off his skin.

He slowly dips back and forth under the water until finding his final resting place on the ceramic bottom of the tub.

Clink.

Michaeld,

Err.

This is a most difficult review for me. I'm all for defying conventions in genre, yet my honest opinion tells me this certainly read more like prose. I had to battle with this though, because who am I to say this isn't poetry? I mean, I can't make that claim. There are definitely a lot of poetic moments.

Her body melts into a crimson red, becoming one with the water.

I fell in love with the above line, for example.

I mean, this was good, this was brevity at its finest. BUT it still felt like prose to me, because the focus here was more about the story than the sound, rhythm, or meter.

Poetry places pronounced importance on the tempo, pound, and pulse.
Single stressed syllables, or unstressed swells, or the song-like sounds
of whimsical words are what work wonders in the poetic world.

Blegh. Well..you get the point. Obviously alliteration doesn't make a poem and I exaggerated it to a fault, but I hope it serves to help you see it now. I hope it serves to help you hear the rhythm better, and you can see the meter is more or less consistent, ranging past 15 beats. I know it's difficult to say what the difference is between a poem or prose, because certainly, the boundaries are blurred. You have your narrative poem and your prose poem, but what makes it POETRY is its focus on sounds and on individual words.

Choosing the right words for a poem is based on different considerations, than the diction for prose. For prose it's all about what is clear, what is natural, what is the voice. Prose is like everyday speech in that sense. Some people say free-verse is like everyday speech, but that would be incorrect. While, it's true a lot of free-verse sounds like speech, free-verse also has a coherent meter and rhythm. It may be asymmetrical, but it will be there all the same.

So.

Sound. Rhythm. Meter. These are essential. That being said, I do love this piece for what it is, though, whatever it is! I mean, people can argue about the classification of it all day, but the bottom line is that it was well written. The ending to me was pretty chilling and the images here are certainly beautiful, if in that haunting kind of way.

Nice job and nice voice. I only hope this helps,

~ as always, Audy

Thank you so much! If I were to write something like this again, where would I submit it on the site?

Other Poetry might be a better section. Most people are unfamiliar with prose poems (which is what yours appears to be), and the Other Poetry section is typically where the more unusual forms usually wind up.

And there's always Other, for all the pieces that don't fit neatly in either prose or poetry.

Like Audy, I fell in love with the body melting line. There were two lines, however, that threw me out of the piece.

He closes his eyes and falls through her, the flickering light from the single bulb above them glimmers off his skin.

You have a comma splice here that muddles up the meaning of this line, since the second clause reads like a dangling modifier. Considering the grammatical correctness (barring enjambments) of the rest of the piece, the comma splice was quite jarring.

A semicolon, colon, or period would be more appropriate.

Clink.

This struck me as rather bleh. I understand why it's there, but it just doesn't look right. If you were to make it visually clearer that it's a case of onomatopoeia rather than the narrator of the poem saying "clink", I think it would go over better. Italicizing, right-aligning, and/or surrounding it with dashes like -so- — something to visually set it off from the rest of the poem is needed, I feel.

As it is, it just doesn't look or feel right to me.