The last stanza works well. Consider capitalizing Rapture to give it a different meaning. I like the imagery but they seem random from stanza to stanza with you picking whichever would visually best captures that feeling or moment but not flowing to the next set of images to lead to the final stanza. I don't get the reference or imagery of "like a slab of honey by the bruising roses". It like the image but it doesn't add meaning to the poem. The first two lines work and so does the last stanz...

I love what you've done with the poem since the first draft. I've always been a stickler with punctuation and line breaks because both add natural pauses when a poem is read out loud. I think the em dashes in the first stanza are confusing. Is a man's best decorum a small thing and part of the sentence in the first line or is that a separate sentence all together. Get rid of the word "the" in front of birds in the 2nd stanza. I reads out loud better with the alliteration between bird and back...

My summation of the poem: Men haven't evolved from their knuckle dragging days because women are unfaithful. I don't like the first line. There's no impact. Suggestions would be: The lovers makers (verb) (something that ties alludes to the title or the last line of the poem). Everything else works. Shock value to the poem is about a 3 out 10. The poem is pretty tame compared to what gets published in the New York Quarterly.

Love as fight or flight is what I understand the poem to be. However, the poem needs to be tighter. First stanza, 2nd line - I think you should play with other verbs besides see. First stanza, 6th line - should it be we not we'll because the dancing is present tense and the killing and dying is future. 2nd stanza - I don't like line breaks after pronouns, they seem arbitrary for two reason. One, if you just take the lines out of context, the breaks don't add any meaning. Two the breaks add un...

I think this poem needs to be much, much shorter. I think you can get to your point in about half the lines. The poem has several parts: Establishing speaker (the wife), the husband's abuse, outside opinion from her mother, the effect on the children and how the speaker feels about her situation looking back on it. I think that each part can be addressed in one stanza each, maybe two at most.

The poem is still very rough. I can't tell if the poems is about how the speaker wants to recapture a past when her mother was still alive and somehow dyeing her hair will do that OR if it's about how that one moment where the speaker sees her mom in the hospital is now frozen in her memory and she doesn't want to be like her mother so she's dyeing her hair. Also, I don't think the ellipses work for the poem. I think a comma would do instead.

I had two main issues with the poem. The first was that the poem was all "tell" and no "show". It's really a matter of the speaker and establishing trust. "Tell" poetry is all one big opinion told by the speaker. For example, "her meddling knows no bounds". Show me instead. What is an example of what she does that can be interpreted as meddling? The speaker of the poem says the being in love is beyond his control. Why should we believe him/her? The second issue is that there are many tools in...