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Becoming Something Like Familiar · Poetry Minific ·
Organised by Anon Y Mous
Word limit 15–1000
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#1 ·
· on What You Will Mean To Me
It looks like you're going for an AABCCDEEF rhyme scheme in the longer stanzas, but it just so happened that the B element rhymed with the A in the first one, which set up different expectations. Minor thing, but it might be better to avoid unintentional rhymes. There's no set rhythm, which is fine. The only really lazy rhyme is "you" with itself.

As a plot, I like the progression from not knowing each other to meeting to loving to breaking up. Though you might have gotten the characters crossed at one point; the "Hating you will be / The most you've ever felt for me" doesn't quite make sense to me. Maybe you meant "hating me"? The uses of "gaspses" as an obvious mutilation for rhyme's sake lends a humorous note, and I notice that the narrator is always speaking in future tense, so it has me thinking he's not actually gone through any of it yet and is fully projecting it into the future.

In the end, this seems to be a take on the "better to have loved and lost" trope, which is nice. The one thing I'm struggling with is how the last long stanza switches from familiar to new. I would have guessed it was because he had only imagined the good parts to that point, but that isn't so; he's already mentioned things going sour before using anther "familiar." So I'm a little lost as to what that part of it means.
#2 ·
· on Sapience
There's a regular syllable count, but not a regular rhythm. And I think you meant "phantasmagorical."

At first glance, I was seeing this as a "Flowers for Algernon" kind of thing, where the mouse had a couple thoughts in passing and reverted to normal, but now I see the lack of end punctuation on the penultimate line means he's retained the intelligence. It's not the thoughts that are through, it's the squeaking and crawling.

It's a nice progression, but I wish there was something more about what effect this has had on him, how it will change things for him. He says he's done squeaking and crawling, but beyond that, I don't know what will change, and there's nothing about how this affects him emotionally; it's pretty factual about it, even though the narrator takes on a very limited voice at the end.
#3 ·
· on Lab Assistant
Structurally, no rhyme is used, and I don't think any rhythm is intended. There's a pattern of two alliterations per line, except there isn't really one on the first line of the middle stanza, unless both alliterations are supposed to be on "m" there.

Plot-wise, it seems like the witch is trying to craft a potion, but has had to make do with a fish when she really needs something furry, so when the cat brings her a mouse, she has what she needs, and the cat becomes her familiar, in a nice twist meaning of the prompt. Or maybe the fish was being cooked separately from the potion. Either way, the sentiment works.

My only beef with it is that some of the word choices seem to be in service of the alliteration pattern more than the meaning. Like I don't know what "growls greenly" is supposed to mean. Maybe the archetypal meanings of colors that English teachers usually bring up when reading The Great Gatsby, though I can never remember what anything other than yellow is supposed to represent.