Living in Sin

“Living in Sin” is a free-verse poem, having no regular meter or rhyme scheme. Even though the man’s and the woman’s stories are separate, the form of the poem places them in one large stanza, suggesting their lives as crammed in their studio apartment. Even when time jumps from the morning to the evening, the lines are all still within the one stanza. The poem also features enjambment with sentences carrying over from one line to the next, bringing forth the elongated sense of time and the ongoing activities and thought process of the female character in particular. Many, though not all, of the lines have some type of punctuation mark at the end, such as a period, semi-colon, ellipsis, or comma, that serves a function to understanding the content. For example, the line that ends with an ellipsis is about the beetle that the woman encounters in her kitchen, and the ellipsis seems to suggest a longer exchange between the two than the poet recounts.