Jeffrey Meyer's (centurymeyer35) Reviews

~ "Why you made it so easy to let me go" That's almost a riddle unto itself. What is unclear to the speaker in the poem is not why it was easy to let go, but why the other person designed it to be so or caused it to be so easy to let go. That's a step further into hurt, and such a great line.

~ "In the cracks of my chest" The pain of losing someone is still too clear to me, even though it has been years. It does feel like something is broken in one's chest, and ache or a hollowness. Your line conveys the brokenness of emotions with that unequaled pain of loss; but it doesn't get flowery with heartbreak or other trite phrases. The reader is left to feel what those cracks truly mean.

~ "They weigh more than I can hold" This is a line that takes some thought. If the unspoken words weigh more than the speaker in the poem can hold, then she must say them at some point. The reader is left to interpret this. Does she get these words out in therapy? To a friend? Through self-harm? Personally, I see her standing in her living room and screaming and sobbing at the walls two or three days a week, when it all gets too heavy. But that's the magic of poetry: room for interpretation.

~ "Prevarications" is a correct word for this, but somehow it felt like too expensive of a word for the rest of the poem. It seems to me to be a five-dollar word among three-dollar words—haughty, I guess, is the word I'm looking for.

~ Immediately on the heels of the above, "genuine honesty" is repetitive. Honesty is, by definition, genuine. I rather think the modifier could be pruned without damaging the line.

"Daily Flash Fiction Challenge"  - This is good for learning how to be very succinct. You have to tell a story in 300 words or fewer.
~ "The Writer's Cramp"  - This is great for getting good at thinking fast—an entire short story in 24 hours. (This is one I'm struggling with right now...but it's fun!)
~ "I Swear I'm Cool Somewhere!"  - This is a fun forum for letting your imagination go, but capturing the good time on paper (or on the screen, as it were).
~ "The Adam West Conspiracy"  - This is a contest I host. You're welcome to take a look and see if you want to play along.
~ "The Contest Challenge"  - Last one. This is kind of a hub for several different contests.

~ I think your presentation of verse might be better achieved by using a more classic mode with line breaks offering rhymes at the ends of each line. The reader finds the rhythm and the rhyme, and has a hard time focusing on the story because he is constantly trying to catch that rhythm throughout the lines.

~ Your rhythm is irregular throughout. It holds to a loose framework, but it's like a flight of steps where some risers are less even than others: the reader trips and stumbles over some of them. Perhaps working with classic line breaks, as mentioned above, would help identify areas of opportunity to even out that flow.

~ There's some punctuation that can be tightened up. Although, at the same time, most of it is spot-on. But some of it did trip me a little, so I wanted to mention it for your own reference.

~ The middle part, which is certainly prose rather than poetry, is begging to be reworked to fit the rest of the poem. It's where the turn is, where the absolute most important part of the poem is (except for that wonderful third line).

~ You might also consider letting the second to last line go away. "Stupid" just doesn't fit the rest of the vocabulary in the poem. It sounds argumentative and petulant compared to the rest of the pointed, deliberate verbiage.

~ This is totally this reader's opinion, right here. Consider single-spacing some of your lines together, like stanzas. Let them capture complete thoughts—not terribly unlike that middle paragraph, only grouped as lines.

~ While I frequently advise writers to use a larger font, this choice may be a little over the top. Pear in mind that this is opinion; there's no rulebook anywhere saying what font you should use. But Size 5 Courier Bold makes the letters so big that the user has to scroll a lot to read the piece. I will admit, on the other hand, that it is easier to see. Again, this is an opinion.

~ More important than anything, the dialog is very stilted, very stiff. It reads as though English is not one's first language? Specifically, there are far too few contractions and pronouns. For instance:

“We’re going to continue toward our next destination,” answers Harold. “We should have enough gas to get to our next destination. After that, we don’t know how long it will take us to find more gas. It depends on how advanced this city is now.”

      Would read more smoothly as

“We’re going to continue the journey; we have to,” answers Harold. “We should have enough gas to get there, but after that, I don’t know how long it will take to find more. It depends on how modern this city is.”

I suggest using contractions more frequently, such as we're instead of we are, for example.

~ There was a part of the conversation with the family that seemed very odd to me. The conversation centering around the children's puberty and potential for sexual activity and parenthood seemed very, very far from a) any conversation that children that age would initiate, and b) so unrelated to the main story that it felt awkward and forced. I'm not advising that one censor this kind of conversation; there's nothing wrong with the topic at all. This conversation simply doesn't feel like it belongs here.