The 7 hour war

[cjchaffin]

Jake. I love science fiction poetry. Your opening and closing lines are the superior ones. The intervening passages are a bit too technical, visual and visceral. For me this may have been more effective had you stuck to the ethereal flavor of the bookend lines. Thanks for sharing your post-apocalyptic world with us./Chris

agreed. the bookends really work and i would love to see more of that in the interior.

for me, the poem starts to break down a little right here:

Until it grew too large for its case, and we had to control it;
a weapon race digitized to protect us from ourselves. please correct me if i'm wrong, but neither this nor the preceding phrase are independent clauses, so you can't use the semicolon to connect them...
But we forgot something essential, and it took us deeper into the heart
of the factory, where red-eyed butchers hang human corpses on meat hooks.

i think that if you defined it (a pronoun you've used three times in these four lines), fleshed that out with a more descriptive/poetic vision, and cleaned up the punctuation, this would help strengthen that middle section. it functions as a placeholder but doesn't really add anything of poetic value in the long run.

otherwise, much enjoyed and i look forward to an edit.