I know what I said

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

#ok well aside of the dialogue i think its good#“not loudly. worse than loudly. softly” is very very good im sorry to say#either you failed op or i have bad taste#maybe both

Honestly... Perhaps what's going on here is that at no point are we discussing "What makes writing good".

This piece was emotionally powerful.

The mix of dialog and scenery helped pull me in.

The metaphors were unusual and yet fullly parsable. hell, I could feel the *threat* from the prisoner's description of the creatures in the artic ice.

The emotional crisis from the interrogator felt.

And through all this, we are left with a sense of being foreign to the scene, despite being able to fully understand it. We're invited in to both perspectives - the perspective of the interrogator who must face an emotional reality he was wholey unprepared for, and the perspective of a prisoner who has accepted and welcomes what to come. Who has clearly delt with and is prepared to deal with hardships and GAH!!!

Okay enough jushing, I had a point -

This writing feels "Good" because it is "Emotionally effective" If writing is about communicating, then this piece is powerful because it certainly communicates!

One might argue it's not "good" in an accademic sense. But honestly? TO HELL WITH THAT!

Acadamia exists to help us understand what is, and how we might use it. It does not get to make the determination for us what is good or bad. If we are brought along with the piece, and get to be brought into the experience, does that not make the piece worthwhile? Does that not mean that, if a piece appears bad in an academic sence, that it is the academics who have missed something?

This fake exceprt captured so much in the short amount of time it had with us. Sure, there are rough parts, but even the rough parts contribute towards delivering the scene's setting, stakes and message!

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

L with a dash through it (ł) makes a “W” sound. and W makes a “V” sound.

Her husband’s job

Her child-care arrangements

How she nurtures her underlings

How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field

How she’s such a role model for other women

Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.

“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”

Early on during the pandemic, various media corporations tried their best to cover up what was happening, and anything mentioning the word "zombie" got shadowbanned, so a mountain of euphenisms came up instead because everyone knows what you're talking about when making a post complaining about how you'd really need to go get groceries but your neighbours have ~*forgotten their manners*~ and are blocking the door.

I heard this person say "uhhhh yeah can I get a prosquito sandwich please?" and I knew I'd never be the same. Prosquito. Prosquito. Its everything to me. I haven't been able to stop saying that lmfao. This is my spinch. This is my bagel and creem cheems. This is my ranibow sprimkle.

It. It literally did. That was literally precisely the point.