Nice--the "fresh green apples" line has a bit of a "Fern Hill" vibe by Dylan Thomas. (I give a nod to Thomas in one of my own songs for the Gravitropes). Why are the apples fresh, though? Something about that word seems a bit of a cop-out, like the word one would expect to appear there. Is there another more arresting or incongruous or resonant word that would pull greater weight there? Fey? Reckless? June? Starry? Probably I'm just mangling the idea you want to convey so I'll just stop. The ...

Wow--this is the real deal. I haven't seen the first iteration, so I hope I'm not making a careworn suggestion that you've already considered and rejected, but stanza three lapses into passive voice after the first four images. At the risk of sounding like a passive voice Nazi (which I'm not), I really think this would work better either as active voice, or boiled down to noun and prepositional phrases (eg "to the spare keys on the grand piano..." etc.) The fourth stanza I thought captured a ...

Great first stanza! Lines 2 and 3 especially--they carry a strange dream-logic vibe. The third stanza was a bit of a let-down for me, though; it seemed as though you were too eager to push a message for this poem, as though you had decided what you were going to say long before you wrote it. Thanks for letting me read it--I would love to see something that builds on that first stanza and really cuts loose a little more.

I hope you won't take this wrong, but have you considered that what you wrote in "Notes for Reviewer" actually looks really cool as a poem? At first I thought that WAS the poem, and I thought the last line was amazing--it really made the poem fly away at the end. Compared with the Notes for Reviewer, the actual poem struck me as a little more manipulative and a little too domineering about what the reader should feel. I'd like to come back to this poem again without the notes and see it fresh...

Thanks for letting me look at this piece! I guess it's not speaking to me, though I did find the title intriguing and felt that you set up an interesting sort of crooked rhythm in the first stanza. I think it would be really cool to stick with that rhythm and play with it, tweak it, in stanzas two and three--right now they seem just a little clunkier. Anyway, sorry that it's not really my cup of tea!

I'm afraid this one just didn't so much for me--the pacing seemed haphazard, with some rather pedestrian moments getting lavish treatment and description, and then other moments (like the crash) feeling sketchy and under-written. Also the description struck me as somewhat adolescent male wish fulfillment rather than something either realistic or truly saucy and sexy. Don't read too much into my one sour opinion, though--thanks for letting me read this!

Damn--this is hot! But young adult? Are you trying to corrupt the adolescent readership here? The only thing I missed here was what the narrator was doing with herself--or what the man was doing to her--as she was sucking him. The ending didn't seem quite edgy enough, either; it would be hot to have some sense of much harder action to come.

I think this piece really strikes a nice balance between distance and intimacy, or the weird illusion of intimacy that actors strive for in the theater or that strippers use with their audience. Something very intimate is happening in front of people who are basically strangers, yet the intimacy is false: the participants never end up bridging the true distance between themselves. The second to last stanza strikes me as a little weaker than the rest of the piece--it seems vague and abstract w...

You are a very talented writer! You have some very muscular sentences here, and although I didn't agree with all of your choices of imagery (some of them struck me as forced or self-indulgent), you clearly have a knack for metaphorical language that I think will pay off later. Your pacing seemed a bit haphazard in this piece--some plot points that shouldn't move quickly (like the decision to meet Mischa, for instance) had a rushed and somewhat underwritten quality. It would be nice to see you...

Have you shown this to your friend? I hope he likes it! I would have enjoyed something a little more imagistic--that is, with a little more "show, don't tell"--but one of the nicest things you can do for a friend is write a poem for him. Watch your spelling on "humerous." Thanks for letting me read this!