July 4th At Hicks Creek Meaning

I really enjoyed reading your poems. I thought you included many original lines and images that were interestingly refreshing to interact with. However, at some points I may have liked a bit more clarity to figure out just what going on in each piece. Nevertheless, even when I found some lines a bit confusing, they were still beautiful in their imagery that I did not ever really mind having to reread for the sake of clarity. Your writing in “july 4th at hicks creek,” is a perfect of example of your specific, beautiful descriptions. Between reading lines like “your almond milk breath” and “you roll your cigarettes with lavender,” I found myself very intrigued by the characters you describe. The meaning I got from this poem was that the speaker thinks of himself and the other prominent character in the poem as

The first time I read it, I was unsure about the meaning and how the images interacted. However, I did not feel deterred by this. Rather, I was eager to go back and try to string things together. I think this was due to the fact that all of the images were very concrete and accessible, allowing for me as a reader to navigate them quite familiarly. You also have a mix of details the speaker knows or seems to be lacking (i.e. there was a wedding there once I do not know whose). Near the end, you provide a realization, writing “it was my parents there was a chocolate cake.” This realization is followed by a stanza that seems to describe the death and burial of the speaker’s dog. In turn, with a lot of the negative, even morbid, imagery you provide, the poem seems to represent a loss of innocence for the speaker. However, it did take a lot of thought for me to come to this conclusion, and I am still not truly confident in if this is meaning you intended. If I was very far off from perceiving the meaning, you may want to think about how your lines interact to provide