Ahmed! I could hear grit in the entirety of this piece.
It is okay to be candy glass, even when the rest of the world is a bullet.
This line, and the that last line, “Let this be the worst of it.” really stood out for me. There’s a bit in the middle where the poem feels a little unsure of itself, where it feels a tad repetitive — but throughout this draft there are huge chunks of gold, like “Dreaming about the kind of love the rapture is made of”
There’s a sense of confession in here, a diary’s worth of life lessons, some really sharp lines packed with some serious wisdom. It feels like the structure of the piece could do a better job of supporting those stellar moments. There is so much gold in here, attaching a word doc with some comments on specific lines.