Typo: some of the other woman who work there

Switched into past tense here: The raccoon bowed slightly.

Another typo: the helving units

Very charming story, and typical of the author. It does hint at a lot of world-building without explaining much, and I wish more of it was elaborated on, but what's here is very fun. I'm a little surprised Linda didn't see this coming when the road bent the wrong way, given that she apparently is used to this kind of thing, but having her react differently could spoil the surprise. I'm also curious whether the multiple Earths mean parallel worlds, as in are there multiple Martys out there. Maybe a bit fast with the hints of a developing romance, since Linda had never shown any interest before, but maybe the short time available has pressed her into action.

The internet black hole ate my comment on this, and I don't remember all of what I said, so I'll try again.

The rhyme of "been" identifies the writer as likely British... and the "s" on the end of gleans kinda breaks that rhyme. The rhythm mostly works, but if possible it's good to avoid words like "orange" and "tertiary" that can be pronounced different ways with different syllable counts. I had to read back over that a couple times to make it fit.

The start seems to be a similar theme to two of the others, where there's still life under the snow that will emerge again in spring, but then it sounds kind of bleak at the end. Yet I can't put my finger on exactly why, since I didn't understand it once the stanza structure started to change. The way you describe the "arrayed" house fronts on a hill (just the fronts, not the whole building, leaving a flat image in my mind) and liken them to something much smaller, celery, puts me in a mind of gravestones, particularly with the mention of death there. If that was intentional, it's subtle, but it worked well.

I wish I got the ending better, but it has a nice atmosphere.

Ah, a rondeau redouble! These are tough to write in English, since you only get two rhymes. I did one for the county fair back in the fall. I even bothered to have the middle of the first line rhyme with the end of it so that last partial line also rhymed with the line before it. I went with tetrameter, whereas you have pentameter, and I don't recall if one's "official."

Very clean on rhyme and rhythm, and I like this picture of the person bundled up inside while watching a bird outside (which would have been harder to understand absent the title, but that's not unusual for poetry) somehow endure the cold. The poet has a knack for creating a charming atmosphere.

Incidentally, there are lots of tells as to who wrote what this time. One referring to southeastern flora, one referencing a "California boy," one using a British rhyme.

Well, this is kind of depressing...

At times it feels like a complaint by someone trapped indoors during the cold weather, and sometimes it sounds like the lament of a tree during the winter. Maybe both? It starts out metered, but a couple lines of the first stanza are short a syllable, and what/forgot is a stretch as a rhyme.

Later, with the irregular line lengths and rapid-fire rhymes, it starts to sound like one of those rap-like freestyle spoken-word riffs, and I feel like this is more appropriately read aloud.

I'm familiar with the Shakespearean sonnet, and while this matches the meter and rhyme scheme of one, the way it's divided into stanzas is a little different. Maybe a Petrarchan sonnet? Either way, the rhymes are all clean, and the rhythm is only a little forced here and there. Straightforward subject matter of life waiting beneath the snow to emerge again in the spring.

Took me a second to find the wound. Was the deer that tame, or was the photo taken with one of those motion-triggered nature cameras? I've lived around deer long enough to know how colossally stupid they are, but he looks rather majestic.

What first strikes me is the way there's a row of concrete or brick that would divide the flowerbed from the grass, but the grass doesn't respect the boundary and comes over it. This is the eternal struggle I have at keeping the stupid grass out of my flowerbeds. I don't know enough about palms to realize what is actually happening here. Is a single palm being split? Is it just a couple being transplanted? Or I guess these may not be palms, since you probably wouldn't plant one that close to a house. I'm not sure I want to know about the "quality lubricants."

I like how weird this looks out of context. Presumably the space down near the ground has lots of other exhibits, but as framed, there's just this metal construction with a random dinosaur that doesn't even seem to fit well there. It's overwhelmed by the space, the color doesn't pop against the background, and it just looks out of place. But then the building itself looks kind of old as well, so there's this unadorned aged skeleton of a structure holding up an unadorned aged skeleton of a dinosaur. It makes an interesting thematic statement.

Hm, this makes me wonder about the situation itself. Why is one flag badly faded? And why does it seem to be trimmed down to mostly the stars? The title can refer to the guy holding the flags, the fact that this very worn flag is still there, the old fort in the background... oh, I see that flag is stylized, with an image of part of the US flag over some text from the Constitution. Yes, one hopes the Constitution is still standing, despite continuing efforts to do otherwise...

I'm not sure what I'm looking at. A vaguely defined creature trying to get up after an injury? The vagueness would help it as a prompt, since it could be interpreted a lot of ways.

That's a rather tall free-standing dead tree. Or maybe a disused utility pole? It does rather look like a dragon, even with suggestion of a wings and tail. Pretty cool to spot that.

But to the right on the way back!

I like the shadows and the way you can't actually see the light source.

The "well thumbed" feels jammed into the rhythm, but otherwise, this is technically sound from a meter perspective. I do wonder what's going on with the rhymes. You start with an ABAB pattern, but then drop rhyming altogether until... well, no, it looks like you have an odd pattern of ABCBD, EFGFH, IJI, so it's only the lines sandwiching the middle of each group that rhyme. I'm no expert on poetic forms, so I don't know if this is a well-know one or something you invented.

I love the atmosphere of this, and it's immediately evocative. In so few words, I completely understand what the speaker is doing, what his situation is, and even his history. Plus it's a common enough situation that any reader should be able to identify with it. It's not one of those poems that wows me with its construction, but it is one that sticks with me well afterward because I really understand where the speaker's coming from. And it even does that without attaching a deep emotion to it. Like he says, the book didn't warrant some place of honor, so there's not a catharsis in rediscovering it, but sometimes it's the everyday routine thing that draws out an emotion better than the dramatic. I liked this a lot.

I like this look at what's akin to an alternate take on feng shui. I also like it when poets don't feel constrained to end sentences on the rhymes. Nice sonnet form. Some of the rhythm is off, like "furniture" and "sorcerous" go more hard stress-light stress-unstressed than the iambic pattern that exists elsewhere.

The final line even makes it seem more like a YT post, which ups the ante on this supernatural feng shui even being things people look to the internet for advice on. It does come about suddenly, but on the other hand, it does lampshade why there's no more context provided on all the world building here, since the viewer presumably already knows the basics or wouldn't have been watching the video.

Some mixed feelings, but this was pretty cute.

An amusing message, and it creates a vivid mental picture. On the technical side, the rhythm is irregular, and comes/numb doesn't quite rhyme. Still, a fun piece of verse, and a situation I've been in myself.

Cute tale. Based on the ending, I can't tell whether the frog is law enforcement himself or just seeking justice on his own. The one thing that bugged me is that in several places, it seems to be speaking to an audience, but I can't tell who that audience would be, particularly since it's in present tense, meaning he's narrating it to an audience in real time, as it happens. If so, then why wasn't his audience helping him? Sometimes people still tell past events in present tense, but that still gets back to who his audience is and why he's telling them this story. You misspelled the name as "Creasote" in one spot.

Hm, interesting tale of a vampire hunter. I'm not sure it was a good idea to wait so late to introduce the motivation of Jeroum's daughter. Not that it really recontextualizes things, but that's kind of the point: you change what the context is, but that change doesn't end up mattering or draw me into the story any more. I was actually afraid it would be completely extraneous and open-ended, but you did conclude it. For that matter, why wait until so late to finally name him a vampire? For all that, I do appreciate that it comes to a neat ending. The only part of the writing itself I'd point out is this passage, where you had a lot of repetitive word choice—3 uses of "seem" in only a few sentences.

At first, little was visible, the leaves trembled and seemed to flicker, though they flashed so quickly from green to orange to dead brown that they still seemed an autumn jumble for a while. But then the twigs drew back, and limbs shrank towards the trunk, and its height diminished, the lofty top seeming to collapse down towards me.

So this is someone letting a spoonful of soup slowly spill over and splash back into the bowl? I'm curious if I missed something in there to where the choice of leek matters. Still, there's a nice playfulness to it, and the rhythm works. There are one or two lines where I had to work a bit of a pause in, but the stress patterns all fit.

Kind of a rondeau form here? I've only written the redouble form myself, so I don't remember what the basic form's structure is. It's always tough to write a poem with so few rhyme sounds. The rhythm has no hitches in it.

Sounds like a screed against how online culture is very unforgiving of creative endeavors (or anything, really), which is true enough. It's kind of hard to discern that from the first stanza, but the tough structural demands of the form often make the narrative take somewhat of a back seat to word choices/phrasings that'll fit.

Sorry this round went by without me noticing it, and there's already another imminent. Oh well, I can still leave comments.

Hm, intubation normally refers to breathing tubes, right? Yet the poem speaks more to an IV line. Very thematic with the prompt, making me wonder whether you were the one who submitted the prompt. I never really have much to say about free verse, since any structural decisions will seem pretty arbitrary to a reader. (Despite knowing this as a reader myself, I've experienced it from the other side as well by submitting poetry to contests. It's very hard to impress judges with free verse.) So really the most I can say is that I like the atmosphere created.

Their magic was all theory and no practice

I kind of want to see some more development of how he understands this to be the case. The argument he was having with the professor in the first scene seemed the opposite, where the professor said not to worry about formulaic things the magic was supposed to do and just go on the feel of what it actually does. Seems more like the professor is on the side of practice, and while Polaris might have an interpretation that cuts the other way, I'd like to see his line of argument laid out.

Given how much conversation happens during their attempt to work on the scrolls, things transition over to being more summaries once they come back out of the cave, and it's an oddly distancing effect, as if none of these events matter as much anymore at that point. I wonder if that was just you running up against the deadline and needing to get it finished in a hurry. Then the actual ending also kind of comes out of nowhere. it must really be a new idea to start a new university or else Polaris surely would have heard that about his idol.

With the number of extremely close similarities, I assume this is an MLP story idea that was transitioned over to a general fiction adaptation of it. We have clear analogs of Twilight, Celestia, Spike, Starswirl, Neighsay, and Rainbow Dash, unless I miss my guess. Nothing wrong with that, though I wonder whether you'll post this as an MLP story on FiMFiction or submit it to a fantasy publication (possibly the former until the latter happens).

Anyway. Very cute story in the author's distinctive style, and it reads much more quickly than the word count. A bit rushed at the end, but overall this was a lot of fun.

A few typos, like you call your main character Bundi a number of times. If that was intentional, the purpose of it went over my head.

I found the first interaction confusing. Budi disappears, and it does say he goes to the office, but never has him pop to the pickup location, so it seemed like the client was at the office. Then for that matter, the narrator stays behind to say that, even though it'd been in Budi's perspective and he's gone. Then you do the same thing again when he drops the client off. You shouldn't have a limited narrator telling me things the perspective character can't possibly have witnessed.

Why is Budi paying the helicopter pilot? He's just doing his own job and presumably getting paid for it. A refund for not being able to take it there himself? But then that means the pilot was the client, which doesn't make sense.

The scene in the hangar is cute enough, but you throw so many characters at me at once that I can't keep track of them all. I guess only the one mostly conversing with Budi is important, but she can get lost in the mix.

It ends up being more of a slice of life story, which wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except the way you ended the penultimate scene teases something eventful is about to happen, only for there to be no payoff. I do wonder why he didn't get a tip, since that's a standard kind of thing to do for his service, so either the customer was oblivious to that (including even normal comparable transport) or dissatisfied, but the narrative never hints at the latter.

I do wonder how you got this idea from the prompt picture used.

Cute story, and I like this look at someone wanting to use his powers for more mundane purposes.

Insofar as in some lighting conditions snow and sand can look alike, I've been sitting on a story idea for years that would have fit this perfectly. Oh well.

Seems like a theme this author likes to write about. It's not a bad one.

The rhymes are all clean, but the rhythm of "The wilds pressed right to their ragged edge" requires "wilds" to be pronounced as 2 syllables, which is on the odd side, and the stress pattern of "To bear due humane grace or charity" is kind of mangled. The structure is otherwise clean.

If there's a purpose in italicizing the middle lines, I'm not seeing it. I looked for them to strike a different tone, or perhaps to have a different meaning if removed and read as an isolated stanza, either in order as-is or assembled according to the prevailing rhyme structure, but it doesn't have an obvious different meaning that way.

I like the message, and there are several poignant lines, like the wood of the house having once been a forest itself, and an artificial substitute for the rain being necessary, then all of this displacing and killing the wildlife. It's got a nice atmosphere and an urgency to it that's become a hallmark of this author.

I like the structure and rhythm of this, but I must admit I'm lost. Taken literally, I have no idea what's happening. Given the last line, it suggests maybe this is nonsense verse, which is fine, but in case it's a tad more than that, I went back through looking for puns and couldn't identify any, so if they're present, they're going over my head.