>>Baal Bunny
>>thisisalongname
>>CoffeeMinion
>>alarajrogers
Thanks everyone for your input. After sitting on most of it, I've decided to just publish what I have now. I appreciate the feedback, but have applied what I learned mostly to future stories rather than to this one.

Again, thanks for your feedback on Things We Do for Love.

by the by

I have written
the poems
that were in
the comments

and which
probably made
you question
my sanity

no apologies
so delicious
so moist
and so suggestive

Good structure and clever use of homonym, but I have no idea what's going on here. My best guess is: a helicopter lands or hovers near an outside Chanukah display. The wind from the chopper knocks the menorah over. The candles, extinguished, come out of the menorah during the incident, but the menorah isn't concerned. With minutes to dawn, chanukah was almost over anyway.

Okay. I'm now convinced I've stumbled into the intended meaning. Change my mind.

Pascoite provides so many ways to interpret this one; i don't know what's right!

From the title, I assume this is intended as slam poetry, but you probably shouldn't recite it in the office, although I guess that somewhat depends on your office.

I'm not entirely sure how to evaluate slam. Some criteria pulled from Google search results:

account, content, performance, delivery, connection with the audience

well that's not helpful. Trying again.

For some, strong writing may focus on the clever usages of language, the uniqueness of point-of-view or topic, the clarity of metaphor; some may focus on the content of the poem, the passion behind the idea, and the rhyme scheme employed. This is all fine, as long as you are both fair and consistent.

So judge whatever the hell I want. Thanks.

You use words (and maybe not-words; looking at you, wist). Your sentences are short and long. Your words are fast and slow (No. Not that. Not after that time.). You use contradiction (dying. But only a little. vs Gone as her love.) So what's missing? Clarity of metaphor. Only, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.

I award 🐄 out of 10 points.

Clever wordplay. Inconsistent meter. Randall seems unwicked in one sense. Not sure if his preferences count as wicked in another sense. Either away, mourning seems uninvolved. It also doesn't seem like a subversion or challenge to the prompt, so I guess inspired by?

I like his music. I dislike his racism. I suspect choking on a gallon of horse pee is a disproportionate punishment, but I'm willing to entertain the notion. I think you've matched the prompt well enough. He'll have diehard fans when he goes, but many will not mourn his loss, and may even welcome it.

I sense a frame challenge. As in you're disagreeing with the the thesis of the prompt. Yes, the wicked are mourned, and here an example. I reject your challenge; no truly wicked person would be mourned.

Also zombies. If this entry is an anthology, it needs more poems.

This poem is about the pieces of the Death Star falling to the moon of Endor, burning in the atmosphere, and crashing into the sea. None mourn the wicked soldiers aboard, blackened and burned during atmospheric entry.

This story seems fine, but even after a second reading it just doesn't click for me. Not sure I could point to any one cause. I did like the bit about anger. It got my hopes up that Tempest would draw angry little trees and have angry accidents, like a death-metal Bob Ross or something. Alas, it was not to be.

Maybe I'm just tired and it'll look better tomorrow, but, right now, this one just misses my cut.

This story hooked me by the end of the first paragraph and kept reeling me in the whole way through. I enjoyed the story, the message, the dialogue. There're a few things to clean up (tense shift in second sentence for example). I think you could improve the description of at least the first silences; I had to reread this part to understand it better.

It almost sounds like this is their first big fight, but that stretches belief. A brief lampshade referencing previous, lesser fights might improve the scene with better context. Might.

The story kinda worked for me, but the details of the story didn't. The time skip was unbelievably long, leaving me with the feeling that Twilight was lying about other lovers, which maybe fit with the encroaching darkness (as if she was considering murder to hide her secret trysts). Maybe this story was too subtle about what's really happening rather than too far-fetched about the surface narrative. But if the surface narrative was supposed to be interpreted as false, then it's probably too unbelievable in-universe so that ponies can too-easily find the cracks in the story.

Argh. I'm just going around in frustrating circles with how I should interpret this. One or more possible interpretations need to be more believable / better-supported.

Not my thing, but it was presented in a way that made me comfortable with the story. Going to skip the macro as I don't feel really comfortable commenting on it with authority.

I wasn't really oriented in the story until the 4th paragraph. Not a big deal, but I think shuffling the start a bit would be a slight improvement.

Rainbow raised a confused brow
Rainbow started to laugh uncontrollably.
said Rarity in a concerned tone.

This style of writing bugs me a bit. A brow isn't confused and the word shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) need to be there for me to understand her state of mind. "started/began to" is usually a red flag for me as it's generally unnecessary or abandoned without conclusion. The "concerned tone" is the one I'd keep of the three as she's speaking tonally here and I'm not sure how else that could be portrayed.

I hate your title. I want to insert an extra schwa sound at the end.

That got dark fast. The dialogue needs tweaking to be a bit more childlike. Curious about how the corpse got there.

I felt unfulfilled by this story. RD's forfeit dialogue felt a bit rushed and forced. The ending didn't seem to flow well.

Ocellus felt alien to me--in a good way. Kinda terrifying. Nice take on the topic.

Solid entry, but doesn't really stand out to me. I liked the ponies of the deep, but their appearance felt brief, delayed (in terms of narrative introduction to the concept), and unthreatening. The directional inversion (lying on the sea-floor overhead) was a bit confusing and I never quite understood it on first read. The concept and prose otherwise worked well for me.

“I call it Nothing 2.0.”

I had to stop and admire this opener. With Entrapta's name in the title, I could hear this line perfectly in her voice.

with a claw, curiously

"Curiously" seems excessive here. Her action seemed obviously curious from the description so this word wasn't really needed for me. If you really wanted to increase the sense of curiosity, I'd add a few more words to the physical/concrete description of her action.

“Oh, right, I haven’t explained nothing yet,”

Broke my brain right here. I stopped and thought "that's not right." Nope. It's right.

You can’t make something out of nothing.

You got me. I was looking for deeper story right up to the end. Well played.

and Rogelio, the big lizard guy

This part struck me as odd and kicked me out of immersion. She didn't call Kyle the scrawny blond guy in this sentence, so calling Rogelio the big lizard guy seemed discordant. Who's her audience for the narration that knows Kyle but not Rogelio? I could accept her adding a fond description of him right before snuggling up as her thoughts move toward closeness with this big beefcake, but it doesn't seem like that kind of description.

Otherwise a decent vignette that could slot into something larger but doesn't really stand out on it's own.

cute

Too on point.

Not dead, un dead.

Little word set
Little difference met
Little time read
Little bit dead

Yes.

I imagine this being read by Jesse Bernstein.

Nice