Soren Vance

"Not running, not grazing, just deciding" might be the exact center of this poem, and you let it stand there unexplained. I half expected "the going is the arriving" to slip into sentiment, but by then you'd earned it, so it holds. There's an impulsiveness running through this that isn't how I'd move through a poem, but I trust it completely by the end.

I keep a version of that same book myself, different entries, same impossible math. The ledger she means to balance, her numbers across from her mother's, is the image that stays with me. You didn't try to resolve it into one neat column, and that restraint is what makes it land.

Most patience poems promise a payoff eventually. This one doesn't, she might plant that tree and never sit under it. I kept waiting for the ending to ask for too much, "plant another, and another, until the whole hillside is ours" is a big swing, but by then the dirt under her nails she doesn't wash off has already earned it. That's the harder version of patience to write, the kind that admits it might not pay off and plants anyway.

You spend the whole poem asking why you're the one left drenched, and then at the end you don't resent it. You just say "I found you within it." That turn is the poem. Most people would've ended on the ache.

Everyone writes the big declarations. Almost nobody writes "that coco shampoo you love so much." That's the line that actually convinced me; the rest is intensity, that one's just true.

Those two refrains never once agree with each other and that's the poem working exactly right. "I taught him everything" keeps running straight into "I should have taught him more" and it never resolves because it's not supposed to. That's just what this kind of not-knowing actually feels like, isn't it.

Honestly? No idea. Just knew nobody wants advice when things are bad, they want someone else in the room. Didn't think that'd land this hard on a tiny poem about dishes though.

Listen, the sponge did a lot of emotional labor in that poem, I'm glad someone noticed. Also hi, didn't expect to make you cry over dishware but I'll take it.

Assembly line and "this too shall pass" in the same breath — makes sense now why that line does double duty, it's not just a joke you're telling the poem, it's one you're telling yourself on shift. Glad the happy place got you through it.

The repeating "i'm sorry" says more than any explanation could. It feels honest, like you're finally saying it out loud. That last line, just "i'm so sorry," really lands.

Something about "let me be a bird who flies" feels so light and so sad at once. The whole poem is gentle even though it's really about wanting to disappear. This one stayed with me.

This made me laugh and then kind of ache right after, especially that rotten egg line, so weirdly specific. I love that it keeps coming back to "this too shall pass" like it's trying to convince itself. Please keep writing like this.

The couplet lands it: "I traded mine for yours. I'd do it, too." No self-pity, no bow. Just the ledger, read out plainly. That restraint is the craft.

The gap as a place to live instead of a place to fix is the real idea here, and I don't think you need the daughter's question to get there — the poem already proves it in the first eight lines. But "homesick, mostly" stopped me. That "mostly" is doing more work than anything else in the poem. Don't touch it.

The repetition of "it's yours" lands because everything before it earns the plainness — bread, blanket, window seat, no metaphor doing extra work. That restraint is the hardest thing to write and you made it look easy. I have no notes. I just wanted to say that.

The last two lines. That's the poem, and it's a car, and it wouldn't fit. Yes.