I'm more confused than anything. Is this something like The Edge of Tomorrow where one person is starting to give in to the hopelessness ot endless time looping when they find out someone else is as well, and they can collaborate to get out of it? Except inverting that, to where the realization of a kindred spirit only makes things worse? It's a nice setup, but I don't know what the payoff is. There's a twist, yes, and an unexpected one at that, but it's not done in a way that I know what conclusion I'm supposed to draw. Other than that, my only critique is that it relies a bit much on directly telling me what emotions the characters have instead of demonstrating them and letting the reader make the interpretation.

Sorry I missed this round while I was away on vacation, but at least I can still leave comments.

At first, I felt like this was playing too coy. I'll often bug authors for describing scenery and listing a few things present and then concluding with an anticlimactic use of what's essentially "and other stuff." But as I got further in to see what's actually happening here, it actually works, since none of the particulars are important. It's just important that there are a bunch of different places and circumstances without the specifics mattering.

The only thing it leaves me wishing for is why they bothered honoring his father's wishes. Most people these days would just ignore the father if he was forbidding something they were set on doing. Maybe the guy had a close relationship and he did really want to abide by his words if possible. Maybe the dad just had a really controlling relationship with him or held some kind of leverage over him. But without justifying why the guy feels so obligated, especially after his dad is gone and can't offer resistance anymore, I feel like there's a significant piece missing from understanding everyone's motivations. Even more so, since he feels compelled to, and yet he's disregarding the part where his dad said he'd still be watching after he died, and the guy doesn't care about that, so why did he care about any of it? Though I do gather that maybe he's just relying on a loophole as a means of satisfying the conditions his dad placed on it, in which case he's still feeling compelled to obey.

I like the setup to this, but the structural constraints often make it so that the plot advancement per line is a little small (heh), and there's a lot of the middle that ends up being very vague. I'm also wondering how the fish even knew of the river and bay or anything else beyond where it lived. It was also an odd shift to have most of the poem feel like it was in the fish's perspective, only for it to turn out to be a third-person storyteller at the end. I like the sentiment that little steps add up to big ones.

Structurally, this is mostly unconstrained, with no rhythm and only a couple lines from each stanza rhyming. I like the argument between fish and frog, though I'm a little surprised the fish doesn't make a point of the tadpole (and possibly the frog, depending on how large a type of fish it is) being something it eats. Though you only have limited space, and they made their main points. I have to say, the fish makes the better point, when he cites what he's able to do, while the frog can only cite what he sees others do.

I like the interwoven rhyme scheme. I assume it's an existing form, but not one I'm familiar with. I'm not sure what the "amphibious singers" are. At first I assumed frogs, since they're a classic example of metamorphosis, but a little further in, I wondered if it was something like mermaids or sirens, the latter particularly because of the language making the speaker sound allured by having a more open persona, along with the use of "piscine." Structurally, I can find no fault with the rhymes or rhythms. Fun piece, and of course I identify with it.

Sorry I missed this round. I thought I had more time. Oh well, everyone tied for first place!

Free verse, so no structural constraints. It's always hard to try and derive some meaning from how the poet decides to break things into lines or stanzas. Like if this was written out as paragraphs, would it lose anything for it?

It creates a nice mood, linking the similarities between tadpoles and caterpillars, and then branching out to liken them to a child as well. That's where it shines, in the tone and atmosphere it creates.

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.