This has a more complex structure that it initially appears. Most lines are 12 syllables that start with a detached word, then seem to use alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, though it's forced in a few places and I can't tell if it's intended to have a rhythm at all. The final line of each stanza is 14 syllables and does appear to be iambic.

What caught me by surprise was the internal rhyme of each 12-syllable line, where the first word rhymes with another about halfway through. In fact, the final line has enough of a slant rhyme in the same manner (bliss/loneliness) that I thought you might be doing it there as well, but the first stanza has nothing close in its finishing line.

As to meaning, it goes a bit over my head. It sounds like a person going through a gate to a faraway place (or alternate reality), seeking some kind of affinity for nature, and finding none, gets disappointed. Which is kind of anticlimactic and seems like the opposite of the prompt. Some of the first lines hint that it may be the person returning to a once-familiar place and finding it's still suffering from what made it alien in the past. It feels like it's probing toward setting up a coll situation, but I never quite connected to what it was.

Like the recent short story event, I'm sorry i was out of town and not able to comment/vote before the deadline.

Hm, there are a couple of ways I could take this. One is the secret desires that people hold as they trek to and from work. The "secret lives" seems to support that, but I could then also interpret it as the personas these people inhabit when they're gaming online or some such. Until I got to that line, I was taking "the line forms" as meaning these people were all in the same line, and it put me in mind of them waiting their turn at a travel agency of sorts that could make these fantasies come true.

I like the "slalom salaam" wordplay. It's weird, but it also works. More or less free verse, so there's no structure or rhyme to analyze. Maybe the "stretches on" is repetitive with the earlier "stretches on hot sands," and if that was intentional, it didn't seem to be.

Given this author is probably the one who submitted the prompt, I assume this is the idea he envisioned going along with it from the start.

You don't need to put the title in the text. The site already puts it at the top, so now you have it twice.

I like the initial scene-setting, but you also get repetitive in the first paragraph (you use some form of "remain" three times), which creates the impression the whole story is likely to suffer from the same thing. It does pop up again some.

Interesting idea that some dinosaurs actually did have a civilization, though one that was a type that didn't leave any evidence behind. I'd kind of want some more world building to see how that was possible, given that humans left evidence from before they were civilized, but I can accept that as a conceit of this story. Also curious whether this is a situation where then entire planet can be evacuated or just a select few. And how we have the technology to do mass space travel like that but not adjust an asteroid's trajectory far in advance...

I didn't exactly see that ending coming, at least not until the final scene began, but it is a story type done many times before. Good example of it.

Sorry I wasn't around to comment or vote before the deadline, but I was out of town all week.

I started to compile notes on the proofreading things I saw, but there were too many, so I'll just say it needs a thorough editing pass. There are some breaks in perspective. Here's an example:

Thank goodness this contest was based on size alone

This is clearly Twilight's thought process, but it's being presented as narration, thus you're using a limited narration. That is, Twilight is effectively the narrator. But then in the following paragraph you explicitly tell me that these are things Twilight didn't see. If she's the narrator and she didn't see them, then the narrator didn't see them either and doesn't know about them.

It takes the story a while to get going too. It starts to drag in the middle where there's lots of unneeded exposition (Floral's background as a hygienist is irrelevant, for example, and is never given a connection to the plot). Likewise, the first scene emphasizes at least three times (I stopped counting) how hot it is, and that also barely has any plot relevance, only insofar as it explains why someone might want a snow cone.

The ending pun is okay, but I really wasn't following the plot at that point. The plant gets violent as soon as it's threatened, yet when it's scared of Twilight measuring it, it's suddenly going to be docile? Why? It's vaguely cited that it finds Floral's presence calming, but it also expresses that it has no particular reason to trust her, so I don't understand its behavior.

Is this Jackie Chan's uncle? (In looking up whether he had an actual name, I was surprised to learn that Jade's VA was also named Chan but is apparently unrelated, and now works for Google News.)

Reminds me of the skinks I always find in my garage, but they somehow end up desiccated rather than skeletonized...

Looks kind of like a naga when it seemingly has no back legs.

Trying to remember whether I've seen this. It puts me in a mind of something like The Virginian, but I bet it's that Twilight Zone episode where the little boy is all-powerful and everyone is scared to make him unhappy.

Ah, a sonnet form. No problems with the rhyme or meter. I get the gist of the ending, but not exactly how it applies to the cat. I'm guessing it has something to do with how cats abruptly decide petting is over, but I'm not sure how that relates to the truth/lie topic. I guess just that the speaker finds the cat companionable, and the cat's mood can turn in a way that shows him that the truth can hurt? I'm a little fuzzy on that.

These were both really good entries. Only one can win (unless another voter goes opposite me and forces a tie, of course), but they're both very worthy entries.

Well, this was really good. One of those forms that makes you recycle lines, though I don't recognize the particular form. The rhymes and meter are all good. I think the message is rant against people who aren't truthful, and it must be referring to some very important truths since it's worth it to the speaker to poison them. The tone of the poem directly follows from the prompt's continuation. Well done.

I like the atmosphere here, but I'm not convinced the narrator wouldn't have voluntarily gone through the door until now. He'd been trying it earlier, already knew he was in a dire situation, and nothing's been set up to say this creature couldn't have lied to him to entice him to enter, which disarms whatever rules or mechanism he apparently wants/needs to follow. It's hurting plausibility for me a bit as well in that he's been there for days, yet what he's doing to plug the holes doesn't sound like it'd work well, and at the end, the monsters suddenly get more effective at tearing the place apart in a way that I don't know why they couldn't before. Good idea, and the one entry where I could fully understand what was happening (and thus it has the strongest plot for me), but needs a little work as to how the logic of it hangs together.

Hm, I'm not having good luck here. I'm afraid I didn't understand this one either. I'm not sure what statistics have to do with the situation, as it seems to be a pretty binary occurrence. Things can leave or not depending on whether they're above a mass threshold, and some of the obvious things to try aren't mentioned, like if you watch a person walk away, can you still see them in the distance as they reappear behind you? It also just sets up a situation without doing anything with it, so I don't know what the ending means. I was trying to decide whether this would have been submitted before the pope's death so I'd know whether the mention of him was pointed in any way, but assuming either case, I can't find an additional meaning it gives the story, unless it's that they're resigned to divine intervention being the only way out. I just don't know what the message is here.

The beginning was a little rough. You name one character, but then a vague "they" soon after places at least one more there. Given that Morgan remains the only named one for some time, I have to presume the limited narration is in his perspective and that the direct thought is his. Unless you're being non-gender-specific in calling Morgan "they" (such are the dangers of ambiguous pronouns). I'm not even sure once you get to the bike, since you mention "they" dismounting; it could be two people on one bike.

That opening scene could stand to be more impactful. It immediately starts off saying that things look abandoned and wrong, and the rest of the scene gets descriptive of that without adding anything. The additional details don't paint a different picture than the first bit of description, and there's no escalation.

A few small editing things, like a missing word and a slip into present tense.

Okay, you lost me at the end. When you had Quinn reach for Morgan and even formatted it as if there was a twist going on, I kind of expected it to be that Morgan was one of the Others and would attack Quinn. But I have no idea what happened at the end, and for all the exposition Quinn dropped, I still don't have any context for what the Others are or why any of this is happening. So I liked the atmosphere, but I couldn't figure this one out.

The architecture strikes me as foreign, but all the Jeeps would suggest otherwise (as well as knowing who the likely photographer is and where he likely shot it). It's kind of an odd juxtaposition in that it looks like a place where you'd expect activity, but there is none, and it being residential also wouldn't automatically mean activity. Probably it's that the buildings look ambiguous to me as to whether they're houses or bars/storefronts that don't open until later.

Hm, from this perspective, I'm not sure whether this is a staircase or some pavers that just stop. The latter would seem to be more thematic, particularly in that the path at the end also looks like it's obstructed and not more obviously a path than heading to the right.

I'm a little confused about the "waken into crabs" line. I think it means the hatchings are preyed upon by crabs, but I wasn't sure if it meant some of the hatchlings were crabs. Likewise I was confused at first about the early stanzas, since the creatures described didn't seem to be the titular birds, though I figured later that was because you had the species evolving. Mostly a message about a common enough evolutionary strategy: have enough offspring to ensure some survive predation. I can't find any fault in the rhyme/meter.

Ha, I like the metaphor of the title as a relationship. Free verse, so nothing to evaluate about the construction. Simple but effective.

Dogs and mechas both have hypos, huh?

This is coincidentally very close to a scene that just occurred in a recent new episode of Zenshu.

I'm not familiar with the poetic form this takes, but it's not a hard structure to figure out, and it adheres well.

This is one of those poems that I could take having several different tones, so it's a really death of the author thing as to which one was intended. On the one hand, I could see it as striving toward progress in a positive way, but a lot of the language feels more aligned with the current political climate of "you'd better agree with us or else," which... yeah, I feel that.

Sonnet form, and at first I thought you were writing one without a meter, since the first line doesn't fit a stress pattern, but the rest do, so that opener could stand to be tuned up. Though "separate" will also depend on whether you mean the verb or adjective, and either one can parse there.

I'm stretching a bit for the meaning, but what I get from it is that the speaker is inspired by the scale of the universe to rise above petty things and not give in to hate, which is a nice sentiment.

I get the sense of mixing flavor categories to produce something more than the sum of its parts, but if there's a real product here, I'm not sure what that is. I've never heard of combining lemon with honeysuckle, though if the point is just generically tempering sourness with sweetness, then fair enough. Though the ending line suggests this won't actually work, and by then I'm lost as to what it all means. i started to lose the sense of that about halfway through the third stanza.

Structurally, the only possible hiccup is whether "cruelties" is taken as two syllables or three.

Another one that makes it seem like the breaks in form were deliberate to make a point. The first two lines have the same rhythm and syllable count, then the last one plows through all that with the "bitters" serving as a contrast to the prior citrus imagery as well as justifying the breakage of form. I like wordplay with "sourly" and "zesty," plus the pun title, but the "citrus" on the second line may be too on the nose.

I did see most of Adventure Time but didn't watch it regularly, so if there are any references beyond Lemon Grab's catchphrase or the mention of adventure in general, I probably missed it.

This has kind of the rhythm and feel of a slam poem, and the irregular rhyme patterns seem to fit that as well. It felt at first like I couldn't figure out a pattern to it at all, but the slam poem aesthetic plus the explicit declaration that it's in unacceptable condition lead me to believe that's the point.

There's two parts to poetry, the message and the skill of construction, and free verse almost always lacks the latter, which is what makes it have a high barrier to being impressive, but this is only meant to be a bit of silly fun, and it does that well enough.

I was mostly lost. Initially, this reminded me of another write-off entry, but I can't put my finger on which one. The narrator seems to be looking through a place where people have been petrified, but instead of speaking to the world in general, it fixates on one person, with us later finding out... it's the protagonist himself? And all the statues are him at different points in his life? It also seems to be at points both ahead and behind him at times, and I can't figure out how both past and future him would be turned to stone. I just don't know what's going on. The ending makes me think it's one of those situations where someone is desperately trying to change the one minute event in a timeline that will fix it all, but I don't have any clues as to what the larger situation is. Nicely evocative and atmospheric, but it mostly went over my head.

I don't know what AMTO is, so some of this may go over my head. I kind of have the same issue with this story as the first one I read. It quickly becomes clear what the conflict and stakes are, then not much else happens for the rest of the story. There's an effect that sometimes happens in stories as well where every conflict that comes up is immediately and easily fixed, which just conditions the reader to expect that there will be no real obstacles to success. Every objection the father comes up with is put down right away by an explanation from the mother or son, and the dad accepts each one in turn. And while the ending finds a solution that would seem to be acceptable to all involved, it's also anticlimactic, so it kind of fizzles. The one thing that does get slowly developed throughout is the context of what's happening with this war, but it's still pretty vague. The strong point is the logical thread, which makes it all stick together as a believable situation.

The writing's good, but I'm only vaguely aware of what's going on. A power struggle, something akin to mafia, if not that precisely. The characterization is fine, but I'm predisposed not to like mafioso stuff, so I don't know how helpful I can be. The father is characterized well, but the narrator isn't much, so it's tough to develop a rooting interest. The other issue I had is that barely into the story, I know what the conflict and the stakes are, and the rest of it doesn't develop that anymore. Hold something in reserve to dole out through the story so there's a continuous plot arc.