Hi, Alexis! Here is one of the reviews for the package you won at "Invalid Item" . I know that this is an older piece that you haven't messed with in over a year, but the title caught my eye. Great title, and seagulls certainly sound angry to me.

Some things I Like:

You have some really strong word choice in this piece as well as some nice uses of poetic technique. My favorite lines are:

As sea spray dries on masculine skin
Masking the tears man cries in vain

'Masculine skin masking' is particularly good. It could have been too much assonance, but I think it works well.

In general, I like the premise here. I grew up near the coast, so I can certainly appreciate it.

Observations & Suggestions:

"Salt waves lapping on rippled sand"

The use of 'lapping' here suggests that you will continue talking about the waves, but you do not. I suggest "Salt waves lap". It makes the line sound smoother in my opinion as well. This is one of many places that would be much easier to read with punctuation, by the way. This piece is in complete sentences, so there is no reason to have no punctuation (it is not visually appealing, has nothing to do with line breaks or meaning overlaps, etc). It makes the piece a chore to decipher at times-- strongly recommend punctuating these sentences.

"Imprints of feet tide washed away"

This is awkward. I know what you meant by it, but the phrasing could be better here. It looks like either "feet tide" is a thing... which brings to mind stinky water just to see it. Or, the tide washed away the feet rather than the imprints. This is actually a grammatical error-- the 'washed' needs to be close to what was washed here:

"Foot imprints washed away by tide" --- this is grammatically sound and crystal clear (with no yucky foot water).

"Mornings dawn sky saw his pain"

This line made me cringe. Again... punctuation, please. This is two complete sentences crammed together on a single line with no punctuation. This was terribly jarring to me. "Mornings dawn. Sky saw his pain." I also thought it was off-putting that this rhymes with the line before because 1. it is the only end rhyme in the poem and 2. the line before it is far far superior. It looks to me like this one rhymes just to snag some of the glory from the line before it, but it doesn't work.

"Falling knees touch the wet foam"

Love the imagery here, but I think the 'falling knees' is slightly odd. People fall 'to' knees, but do the knees themselves fall? I suppose they do, but it struck me as strange somehow. No suggestion for a change, but I thought I would mention it.

Overall, I think this is a nice piece. It could be very solid with like 20-30 minutes of revision for grammar and punctuation(!), and it wouldn't take long to smooth out some phrasing in here. As it is now, it's pretty good. It could be a whole lot better with very minimal effort from you though. Might as well give it a little polish.



My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .