Poems About Margaret Atwood Seeking Honest Critique

( After Margaret Atwood )

i

A ringing recess bell—
a door spilling children
onto the playground
as ants fleeing a colony

Each pair of feet
contradict the direction
of the former set
until they encase monkey bars
merry-go-rounds
teeter-totters
slides

Most are carefree, but
not all feel the song;
the moving of joy
as blood and freedom's
marrow hardening their bones

Loners, outcasts
introverts, their faces
hollow wells of fear
cold and deep spaces ...

Are you still the captured steer
a wild bellow, snot and dust.
Slapped to raise a breath,
branded from your birth.
Still carry the taint of unwashed afterbirth
Echo's from the Vagina's walls
its cloisters, reverberate with joyous pain.
Encore of feelings,
curtains of prolonged sustain.

Frail strength spun in a spiders thread,
and in dawn's rays,
bejewelled in wonderment.
Its span to cover continents
not the inward naval gaze.
The invisible bond inside each mind,
a hug that bends the spine.

The...

(Parallels of Fictional Tales and Real-World Spells)

There are these men who claim to have more
knowledge over women’s bodies. They issue laws
to have more control over them under the guise of
morality or God and all that that is pure, and so a
plan is formed, but it’s more of an ominous map
that seems to head toward this fictional dystopia

*

Quoting scriptures, they look to these ancient laws,
to a time when women were stoned to death if
they were caught in the act of fornication or some
other decree that...

( After Margaret Atwood )

Before the embryo
that multicellular organism
something cracked—
the egg, wafting
as cottonwood
suspended
within
a deeply folded
mucosal surface.

A precursor of cells
differentiating themselves
into angioblasts,
giving rise
to a formation;
roadmaps of vessels
and stem cells
segregating
into elements.

One ellele
from each parent
contains every ancestor's DNA
before us; conjoined
manufactures
its own blood and cells
to...