10-15-2021, 07:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-15-2021, 07:03 PM by RiverNotch.)
For the first half of the piece, "and our stars" and even "pinning me against the wall" interrupt, the former taking the reader completely out of such a focused scene, the latter being perhaps too violent for the start of an imagined love affair.
We stood there with our sneakers
in alignment.
Your arm gripping
the handrail running over my head,
winding veins disappearing under a rolled-up sleeve,
the carriage rocked and led my feet
one two three steps closer to you.
Thereafter, it seems to fall apart. "I tried not to imagine falling for you and you gripping my waist instead" doesn't make sense to me: the speaker tried their hardest not to visualize what was already happening to them, falling for the subject? And did they try to instead imagine the subject falling for the speaker, or were they also forced by their compulsions to imagine that? Whatever the case, "wards" is worse than superfluous, and then there's "unlike me", the least intrusive parenthetic, which I think would be better served implied. Something like
the train pulled into your station
and not mine.
Overall, though, it's a start. But I don't think the conceit -- the parenthetics -- are necessary. They don't reveal anything that would come off worse by being in the main body of the piece.
We stood there with our sneakers
in alignment.
Your arm gripping
the handrail running over my head,
winding veins disappearing under a rolled-up sleeve,
the carriage rocked and led my feet
one two three steps closer to you.
Thereafter, it seems to fall apart. "I tried not to imagine falling for you and you gripping my waist instead" doesn't make sense to me: the speaker tried their hardest not to visualize what was already happening to them, falling for the subject? And did they try to instead imagine the subject falling for the speaker, or were they also forced by their compulsions to imagine that? Whatever the case, "wards" is worse than superfluous, and then there's "unlike me", the least intrusive parenthetic, which I think would be better served implied. Something like
the train pulled into your station
and not mine.
Overall, though, it's a start. But I don't think the conceit -- the parenthetics -- are necessary. They don't reveal anything that would come off worse by being in the main body of the piece.