Ok, sorry it's taken me so long. My thoughts on both the strengths and the weaknesses of this piece can be summed up in the following:

It doesn't know if it is a poem or a prose story. It reads either like a prose-poem or a poem-story, but doesn't quite seem to land in either realm.

Of course, I'm a poet, so my comments will be geared towards moving the piece in the direction of poetry. Should you decide not to go that route, please disregard everything I say and do the exact opposite. The main thing I'm going to focus on are line breaks, but there are a few phrasing things I'd look at as well. I just find it difficult to focus on that part until it feels more like a poem to me. If you decide to return to this piece and take any of this on board, I'd be happy to keep looking at it. (Because I love it) I've included the initial phrasing issues when I give suggestions, but didn't elaborate on most of them. They should be pretty obvious, and why.


I would take a long hard look at line length here. You want the lines in this piece to be reasonably long. The long lines give a meandering feeling to the story that puts it firmly in the realm of memory. With that said though, some of your images get lost because they aren't broken from other images. In general, I feel that one good, strong image should be on a line, unless they need to be connected to be complete. You went with long lines here, but in my opinion the end result is that you've given the poetic equivalent to a page of a story with no paragraphs. Hopefully my reasoning will be made clear below.

I also feel that this is a piece that could make excellent use of varying line length. Long even length lines are nice when you want an absolutely smooth flow. Short, choppy lines are great when you want the reader to rush through events and play with time. Memories like these are able to (and I feel should) do a bit of both. Long-short-short, short-long-short etc etc. Here is a place that I think that would be effective:

I thought of you the last time
I saw an airplane.
It was a Piper Cub.
My father told me that when I was six.
And eight,
and twelve,
and sixteen.

In this case we would have M-L-M-M-L-S-S-S
My rationale for these changes are as follows:
breaking at time / I saw sets up a duality. It would be ambiguous whether the narrator thought of him for the very last time, or the last time (and every time before) the airplane was seen. To me that is a powerful double meaning, and one that doesn't need to be clarified. The break after the statement It was a Piper Cub serves to separate the factual information from the emotional impact that it's about to have, and also sets up a very simple parallelism with the structure of the line above it.
You get two simple sentences this way. I saw X. X was Y. This simplicity opens the stage for the childhood memories that are to follow. The broken lines that occur with the telling of the ages works the same way that a time jump would do in prose.

The second stanza feel *extremely* dense to me. There is so much going on there, that I feel you rush through it. Again, I would pace the scene with line breaks. Not excessively so, but enough so that the reader can take in each image and piece of information as it comes.

Mother did the same with plants.
I knew the heather
and all the types of oak.
The ones that shed
their petals like snow
are golden rain trees.
I remember jasmine and magnolia
for their aromas and my sinuses.
Cyprus knees are aerial roots,
and oleander is deadly.

Each plant or image (meaning each memory) gets its own separate line. Jasmine and magnolia are together because they are treated as one, and are a good logical pairing. I have memories that include the two myself. Capitalization of Oleander was random. I wouldn't do it unless oleander appears elsewhere in the story and is extremely significant. Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't.


I was raised on trivia,
but it always made you yawn
and look for the clouds.

This next stanza is a bridge. I'd just neaten the breaks up. Keep one action per line.


What if I told you
^I first became a child
when I turned 17 and nothing else mattered.
I laid on the driveway with Melissa
for a day in the Florida sun,
and we named the clouds:
Elephant and flying carpet,
pirate ship in a tea cup.

Again, nothing but spacing images. Give me a chance to picture them before I move on. Where the carrot (^) is, the line break is totally optional.


You end with a paradox, which is great. In order to give the line enough weight for the reader to gather what you are saying, at least break it in half. There are a huge number of ways that you could do this


You wouldn’t believe me that I’m younger
than I was before.



I hope that this helps you. Even if you don't roll with the exact suggestions I've given, I'd encourage you to try to see my reasoning behind them. This piece is far too good to be wasting away in your moldy scrapbook. I'd work on it a bit, and then give the reader the opportunity to vote with their comments and favorite adds.

It makes sense, but not really.
the first two bits are really sweet. Memories are always fun to read, especially when they aren't my own.

the last line confuses a bit.

this is good.

real crits:

"What if i told you i first became..." this line says "I" so much that it stands out more than you'd probably meant for.

"you wouldn't believe me that i'm younger..." is worded awkwardly. not so awkwardly that i want to stab it, which happens, but enough so that i notice and think "thats awkward".

you capitalized some of the plant n' tree names and didn't capitalize others. what basis are you deciding this on?

also, you never say who the "you is".