Six Months in 1995

[cidermaid]

Hi Todd,
I have been back to this one many times over the past week, it reads very topical with all the current media noise over the italian case...not saying that is what this, is just saying there are some images that stick and the last lines of your poem brought some of that case to mind.
I am feeling a bit out of practice after my time out, but will offer what thoughts i have below.

We’d become infected I like this as an opener. it begs a question that only the poem can answer.
with the brightness of the moon– Perhaps a bit on the cliche side of the tracks. When i read the next two lines i want to reconstruct this is some way to an image of false light from the moon and the raggedness of thier breath shaving slivers off moon beams and drawing the daylight nearer....hope this is in some way comprehensible. I wouldn't dream of trying to offer an attempt at a rewrite for these lines. But this is where my thoughts lead my by way of an image from what you have written. I like the image - I just think they could do with a bit of umph!
the rasp of our own breathing;
days that pressed too close,
flash burns on walls, etched I must admit I am not sure what these two lines are expressing, but they feel very specific so i am assuming it is my sheltered life in deepest darkest rural-land, that has left me wanting to from a solid image.
radioactive hieroglyphs
of a pregnant girlfriend,
dominatrix with a bread knife,
itchy-faced bouncer with teeth
that wouldn’t brush clean,
red-dressed addict in frayed
fishnets, covered with drywall
vomit in the walk-in-closet. I really like the details of all the different caracters. I think they ground the poem and bring the story to life. In particular the drywall vomit stockings in the closet - nice!
Glasses clinked and shattered
into lines that crawled up noses burning I do not get how the shattered glass forms lines. After spending some time pondering this I came to the conclusion it was the effect of broken glass used as a weapon on a face / nose. But again it felt like a specific detail, of a particular incident that you had in mind when you wrote this...one that i am not privy to.
inexorable fuses. I like the explosivness of the situation and feel that the answer to the initial question has been revealed....and now we are getting the conclusion of these events.
Arms and legs splayed forever I love the aged deraliction of the rust stained shag image. But i feel I need a little more help with clarification from the punctuation here. Are the arms and legs splayed forever or forever exploded?
exploded over rust-stained shag.
None of us were there.
None of us saw anything.
Something died.
Someone died.
We all should have died. Think this is a great ending. the confessional / regret / shame emotion is hard working and forms a good link to the begining of the poem. A bad memory on a reply loop in the mind. so that combined with the title, this makes for a great skeletons in the closet secret type story. Well for my read at least

I have enjoyed this one and no doubt will be back again to follow any edits and re-read. All the best AJ.