This poem immediately caught my attention because of its physical form--it is written without line breaks. From afar, it doesn't even look like a poem; it looks like a paragraph of a story or narrative. The actual content of the poem, however, is even more intriguing.
The most striking thing about this poem for me was the strong and consistent imagery throughout. By using "for two July weeks the twelve-pound turkey in the freezer thaws" as a way to describe the electricity in a house going out, the writer created an extremely visual and creative image for me that connected me with the writing. Throughout the poem, the haunting tones of loneliness and abandonment grow. This poem appears to describe a very poor, desolate neighborhood. It does not use traditional poem forms or rhyme, but its poetry is instead contained in its language. For example, the line "So many garages for rent, but a tarp stretched over the bed of the pickup truck will hold off the rain a while longer" captures not only another strong image, but also the feelings of poorness and desolation that echo through the whole poem.
I also found a few short instances of alliteration ("dumpsters where deer forage;" "coatamundi caged;" "summer school bus") to be strong poetic elements of this piece that enforced its flow and further colored the images already forming in my mind. Hints of bitterness are sprinkled throughout the overall somber poem as the mayer scowls through this bifocals and ice cream truck music is unexpectedly described as "demented." These small details truly added to my larger reading of the poem. Overall, I thought that even though this piece did not conform to conventional forms and rhymes, its imagery, tone, and bursts of alliteration and creative language truly defined it as a poem.
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