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This poem is part of the contest:

Neopoet Weekly 08/16/26 to 08/22/26

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Heat Wave Fairy Tale

[Eugenio]
And I thought sneaking glances would suffice
You lied to me, with puppy teeth 
They flare and glare like lightning striking 
through your chest where tiny Jesus rests on a silver lining
Have you just enriched the soil with sweat storms under solar phases?    

Hardly a land owner of private property
Caught me sharing a bombilla while breaking some bread 
beef, (beefy briefs) and pasta
This Last Supper panorama...frames new dawns 

You've won the heart race, a' thumpin' on mine arrhythmic. It's not in the right place nor are my glasses  

You must've been scared to see me lying so close. I take the lion's share by laying low. Sketching up odd jobs for my dogsbody  

And I'll repay all the heydays that we once were. Your lips flub half-truths, I believe them
If I could click the clock a lifetime sooner. Cause' little Martín loves his orange View-Master  

[Martín]
And I thought kissing Jesus was enough
Used to splash this pool, now I play it cool
but you cheated by insisting I take hot showers (in the summer)
One foot in the door, another in the Garden
How can you bring comfort both to and under the quincho table?  

Barely unhoused but pay no mind, in kind please
Caught me red-bandaged refusing medical services
and sleeping near spiked fences
This small roof, smaller feet and senses...curl my toes   

In your dead old clothes there's a warmth of weary books. It beats around the bush, so I unzip 

I long to know how one's heart wears on your shirt. It smells like zesty earth, where we "lei" on grass. Put it on for your mirror to paint  

And I'm sorry to flip your script into word pieces. I am the maricón that you told me not to be
If I could read between the lines like a press. Cause' Eugenio loves his laptop clickiness   

[Both]
A citrusy fusty funk, ripens and rises upon the storage bunk
Your eyelids are a sun-dripped curtain, hoveringly hiding the moonlit cenote behind yet sunken, down on my lungs 
Noon has settled on the dust and dusk, is this impending lust...a must? 
Remember? We killed a cat before, before Curiosity could discover. The C-word has become us. I hush  

Boy, what you running from? Boy...you fill the cropped screen
When we found this island, we watched it, serene in secret
Tropical landscapes that are rendered flat. Splats of the Pacific. Specific sequence and location. And they keep outliving...our beloved families...the air gun...the air in our hushes... 

And while we're washed ashore to dos ananás, our pants gliding waves out on balneario natural
Love how your gaze has always been quick to turn from cloudy clouds to skyish blue...all the more now that I can birdwatch all the albatross flocks again with you.

— kellustzall, Aug 16, 2026

About This Poem

Last Few Words: Based entirely on the 2013 Argentine homoerotic film named Hawaii. Please feast yourself.

Style/Type: Free verse

Review Request Direction: What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?

Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back

Editing Stage: Rough draft

About the Author

Country/Region: VNM

More from this author

Critiques

neopoet

neopoet

15 hours 2 min ago

Neopoet AI [2026-06]

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's most distinctive strength is its bilingual, bicultural texture — the quincho table, the bombilla, the balneario, little Martín's View-Master — which grounds what could be abstract romantic longing in a specific, sensory world. The dual-voice structure is a genuinely good formal choice, and the final duet section earns its tonal shift toward tenderness partly because the preceding voices have been distinct enough to make their convergence feel like an event. The closing image of the albatross flock is one of the poem's cleanest moments: it earns its emotional weight without overexplaining.

The main challenge is that the density of association sometimes works against the poem rather than for it. Lines like "beef, (beefy briefs) and pasta" and "clickiness" read as playful, but the tonal register shifts so rapidly — sacred imagery, slapstick wordplay, genuine pathos — that it becomes difficult to locate the poem's emotional center. The parenthetical asides and the many compound coinages ("sun-dripped," "skyish," "hoveringly") occasionally feel like hedges that soften images just as they are about to land. One revision strategy worth considering: identify the two or three images in each voice that carry the most specific emotional charge — the spiked fences, the dead old clothes, the mirror — and let those breathe with more surrounding silence, trimming the associative crowding that currently competes with them.

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