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Stygian Blue 15 Jun 2025 16:45
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » For Ever and Ever

I enjoyed critting this. I feel like there are three distinct eras within the work — the Trek, the Friendship, and the End.

I love the spider It just keeps following. I appreciate how it is never truly resolved, exactly.

The descriptions are fantastic. Some of your best prose, I think, especially in the moments where the jungle is overpoweringly loud and the sun is blisteringly bright. Your work shines.

I love the musical interludes. I love the quiet moments of gender and adoration. I love the process of getting older and how it's a coming out story, but isn't, and how it's a coming of age story, but isn't.

I love the differences in how people talk, the cultures between, the everything.

This work is a journey sung over a fire, quiet and somber at times and delighted and sprightly at others, low and sweet in-between. It's something I hope to remember to tell to children who ask for stories, at times, and hope to walk amidst within my dreams, at others. It's hyacinth and briar mashed into a poultice and made into a cake, and I would like a slice. Well done.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

zipzipskins 15 Jun 2025 16:44
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Gallows Bird

i'll say unequivocally that i think this is the best of rela yet. you weave the beautiful and immediate prose through the stress, disgust, and self-loathing so finely there's basically no patches where i'm looking behind the curtain. it's all here up front and i'm living in it. i loved it when i read it in crit and it's even better now, somehow. the sense of inadequacy while being still incredibly remarkable, oof. i talk a lot to people in this community when they're down on themselves and often i remind them, when they feel their writing is poor, that simply by virtue of effort and putting care into their prose and having a grasp of the craft and construction thereof that virtually every regular poster here is in the 90th percentile of writers of the english language and the gap becomes wider and wider the higher you claw your way up, and that's difficult, but look joe far you've come!

i wish jasper could see the ascent behind and not simply the peak ahead. as i wish for everyone making their way in love and life. +1

Stygian Blue 15 Jun 2025 15:35
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Information Booth

Uncanny, how dare you take my favourite line and make it yours. Now I have to write a different comment.

This is sweet. It tastes like caffeine, nicotine, any other stimulant you can get in your system to keep aay the night and stave off the day — to live perpetually in that after-hours time where theme park rides still roll and crowds still roar. Finding someone and being lost in a crowd, and slipping through secret passageways used by performers like backstage escape artists. Kisses in the dark — if not to a person, then perhaps the moon.

The detail, the splendor, the rush of emotions and heady love. Rose nectar half-solidified and churned into taffy.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Re: WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

meltedbee 15 Jun 2025 06:40
in discussion Forum Discussion / General » WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

Ah yeah - here's here's my entry.

Re: WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

lzhoudidion 15 Jun 2025 06:29
in discussion Forum Discussion / General » WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

On memories

UncannyClown 15 Jun 2025 06:03
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Information Booth

i really envy your eye for detail. this part:

Bakelite and tortoiseshell eroded by perspiration, misting fryer grease, hairspray.

is so good that it kind of pisses me off. i struggle to parse this for a plot, but as a condensed block of images and sensations, i really like it.

lzhoudidion 15 Jun 2025 05:58
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Information Booth

♪ (Selena Quintanilla's music, my beloved)

"I guess in hindsight, none of us were ever really forklift certified—not even the guy they brought in from Craigslist who bragged that he spent all his time as the head foreman for twenty years at the circuit board plant in Toledo before his boss got blackout drunk and struck a bunch of him and his buddies out from under the payroll. In the rare moments Constantin and I had to move a whole eight pallets of frozen medley mango mix from cold storage to a waiting JB Sundries truck, Larry was the one who insisted he do all the work. Got seasoned eyes and hands, was what he said—watched his pa toil as a kid on the edge of Lake Superior up high and dry in a crane with a pack of cigs and a clipboard—peering out a little hatch porthole in the floor at the Illinois Central Gulf locomotives shunting hoppers and mineral gondolas under a bucket claw and the waiting bulkheads of a young Edmund Fitzgerald. The effects of minutia, was what Constantin concluded. We—Constantin and I, hung out every Friday with cheap bento in the park, talking, swinging, climbing oaks to view the hazy molten sun. He came in with a slight cold one day and forgot his hoodie. As Larry clambered into the seat and the Caterpillar forks whirred, klaxons chirping, we stood by: my skin feeling goosebumps, adrenaline and manufactured flush as he accepted my denim jacket, the fabric draped over his shoulders rustling, blooming, swishing, fading away."

Image source, 04.24.10 by Paul Villavisanis

Thanks to Uncanny for taking a look over. For writprompt. Prose poetry on regards to memory, work, connections long since gone.

zipzipskins 14 Jun 2025 17:57
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

cicada………………….

meltedbee 14 Jun 2025 17:43
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

I really enjoy your body of work. I'm glad you have an author page now,, and it's really beautiful. All the best to you

Snapdragon133 14 Jun 2025 17:25
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

Goddamn this is a pretty author page. I'm so excited to peruse the many dave works at my leisure

PallidAlbumen 14 Jun 2025 17:25
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

simple and effective, me gusta

UncannyClown 14 Jun 2025 17:21
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

one of wl's premier poets finally has an author page :-)

daviiid 14 Jun 2025 17:15
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Thy Fearful Symmetry

x

UncannyClown 14 Jun 2025 00:36
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Tribute (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

my appreciation of your work tends to be very elemental and intuitive, and this is no exception. i'm not sure that i really follow what it's about, but it makes me feel that i am in a strawberry field with a shimmering hovering low above the plants, and that's good enough for me. i enjoy the multiple ways of reading as much as i did when dave did it, too.

FleshMaddAvalon 13 Jun 2025 23:57
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Tribute (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

I think the worst part about being trans is that no matter how far into your transition you are you will always possess an element of the self that forever feels like an unknowable, unattainable mask that haunts and stalks you as a shadow and that continues to retain some element of unknowingness and uncertainty no matter your attempts to pierce it's inky veil. This poem captured that in verdant grass and steel eyed stares into the middle distance. Good shit.

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

Re: WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

carolynn w 13 Jun 2025 23:31
in discussion Forum Discussion / General » WritPrompt #1: PRIDE

another one for a different prompt

A Machine for Sloths 13 Jun 2025 22:35
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Tribute (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

hello,

this poem is certainly among my favorite on site. I credit this to the sonority more than anything else. there is something in the sound of it which just remains in my voice after I have read it. I took the zig-zagging central bisection to be a sign that one should read both the poem together, and both sides separately, and that is how I first read through it. this made for an extremely fun and fulfilling reading experience, and felt much like vivisection.

the poem offers to me a portrait of many of the emotions which are the most fundamental to my experience of being, and has the effect of making me feel simultaneously understood and understanding, which I think is one of the four horsemen of good poetry.

thank you very much for sharing

Stygian Blue 13 Jun 2025 22:35
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Tribute (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

Dichotomy of things — american sweet things, strawberries too small and not enough for american tastebuds, too much too soon, all love in favour of—

This was sweet. I like how you can almost make two poems side by side, able to be read separately and then together for three different readings. It's much textured!! Love it. It has so many moments contained within it and separated into three parts — left, right, together — and I adore how the meaning changes when divided between. Absolutely splendid, like eating the leaves and then the vines and then switching. Decadent. Chocolate flowers with honeysuckle nectar

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

carolynn w 13 Jun 2025 22:22
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » Tribute (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

v

Stygian Blue 13 Jun 2025 17:59
in discussion Per Page Discussion / Per page discussions » bark (fade out)

I like how this shows that even when something tries not to change, it is an irrevocable part of the self as shaped by the will of the body to change. An earthworm moves dirt and makes tunnels by the mere fact of its existence; we breathe and love and cry and eat and create as part of ours. To deny a will to change and to attempts to make change is not only a violation and denial of identity, but an act of change in the opposite direction: one has changed the world because that which lives in it is not acting as it otherwise would. There is no way to exist without making an impact on the environment; there is no way to love without warping and creating and crushing those around you, as well as the subjects of your desire. One must remain at peace with it — there is that acknowledgement, the tying-together in the breathless single line of italics before the end, and then the exhale just at the edge of dizziness where we are at peace, a droplet making tiny waves on a still pond. A beat of the heart, then stillness not related to death but to resting, and that is the end like the washed-out elation after a sprint where there is no past, no future, only the ever-present now and the world is good and change has been realized and soon there will be more bu right now it is okay and good to simply be. Raspberry mint tea.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

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