You are not a mere thief
of my breaths – you
trespass through
doored veins,
break and
enter into
latch-locked
capillaries. You are
armed and dangerous:
I forget I have lungs at all.
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Posted in: Kandace
The Criminal
Posted on 01/07/2013 by Kandace Mavrick
Kandace Mavrick
Paul McLaughlan
platform thing 
Greg Tannahill
01/07/2013
“Doored veins” seems a clumsy construction, even read as “door-ed”. Especially combined with “trespass through” rather than “trespass upon”. I’m devoid of context here, though (even after visiting the original site); is there a level of meaning I’m missing that justifies the choice of phrasing?
Kandace Mavrick
01/07/2013
Poetry is a judgement call.
Greg Tannahill
01/07/2013
Oh, no, it’s a nice piece of poetry, which is why I clicked through and bothered to comment. But being such a short and artistic form, each word choice is even more significant than say, a novel-length prose, and the fact that my reading stumbles each time at “doored veins” just left me wondering if I was missing something larger. Sometimes an odd phrasing like that is the clue to another layer of metaphor that might otherwise go unremarked.
Kandace Mavrick
01/07/2013
Not that I am aware of. I do not know the poet personally nor have a great familiarity with her work. Sometimes a jarred note like that is deliberate but I don’t have any particular insight into the choices she made. I just like the poem 🙂