We ate them.
They did not hiss as they tangled around our arms, did not hiss as they squeezed our wrists into shapes they did not belong in, did not hiss as we cast them into the fire, cooked them in the bowls of our hands. We told ourselves this was their consent: their admission to be gone,
down, buried in the cave of us. We ate them because we were starving, because nothing tasted like anything; the maw of our stomachs, so consumed in its own gravity, was clenching itself into nothing, an egg that would not hatch. We ate them for this. As we lifted them to our mouths,
their fangs bit so deeply into us that our jawbones glistened in the air, wet with blood and venom, and as we swallowed them, they bit the insides of our hollow-stone cheeks, our throats, our whale-mouth stomachs. We ate them with the grit of charcoal and fire in our hands and tongue, the smoldering of the coals burning the hollow of us as they went down, and we writhed with the pain of it, unsure where their twisting ended and ours began,
and we ate them and they were gone. They dropped, heavy, into the hunger, solid and dense as stone, coiled, uncoiled, beat themselves against us as if the lining of our stomachs were the skins of a drum. Sounds like babies or thunderstorms clambered up our bitten throats, reached from our mouths with spindled hands, hissed, crackled, boomed, and echoed back down. We ate them because we learned that Eve ate the thing that broke her open,
that it beat its fists on the inside of her, that it split her in half and squalled against her breast, and we wanted to be broken open too.
They burrowed in the tunnels of our intestines, pushed like the roots of a tree through our veins. We ate them for their hiding, for the half-egg crowns that triumphantly hatched again and again, for goneness, the impact and glass-breaking of our own shells, the opaque red glow of blood, sun, and birth,
and we bled, and we hatched, and we burned.
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,734 Reviews
Hey Per- uh Hey Pocket!
So I'm not exactly sure what sort of effect you were going for with this but it definitely grossed me out.
I think you did a really good job with the language of the poem. The sounds it has are really sharp and bold much like what the words themselves mean. You do a really good job with that, and since I've been reading your stuff, pretty much always have. For what it's worth, I also think that you've got a really clear narrative going on here, and there's not too much or too little with this poem. You've got it trimmed down to just enough for us to understand what's going on and explore that in our own time as we read.
I think the thing that's not really so clear about this poem is how it connects to the title. I've researched Margaret Atwood before, and I've read some of her stuff, a couple chapters of one of her novels, and several of her poems. I don't know if I'm just missing it, or if it just isn't very obvious. I feel like using her name is going to call into question mostly futuristic stuff, that inch away from our true reality, but I'm not really getting that in this poem.
Mostly I think it's because you have quite a bit that you don't explain. I'm not exactly sure what the image should be for "we cast them into the fire, cooked them in the bowls of our hands." To me, this says that both the hands and the snakes are in the fire, but later, you talk about the hands almost as if they are the fire, and that these snakes are still alive, so what was with the fire in the first place? "We ate them with the grit of charcoal and fire in our hands and tongue, the smoldering of the coals burning the hollow of us as they went down, and we writhed with the pain of it, unsure where their twisting ended and ours began," so this part has what I'm talking about. How I understand the earlier section is that the snakes are on their hands, so they're not getting charcoal on them, they're just burning and the hands are basically acting as a pan, which means the heat hits the hands, not the snakes until the hands are heated through. The reason it's this way and not that the fire is on the hands with the snake is that "we cast them into the fire" not "we cast the fire onto them" which means that we are moving the snakes to the fire. The fire isn't moving. For the fire to work, it has to be smoldering on coal and making ash and all that stuff. Basically, the problem I get is that the snakes aren't in the fire, the hand is in the fire. The reason mostly is because of "bowls."
Interestingly enough, if we look at the first indications of how these snakes are on the hands, we get a different image. Instead of in the cupped hands, "they tangled around our arms" which means that shoving your fist in a flame is going to definitely cook the snake, but it'll probably also run away from it.
It's a minor detail, but I think it is super important for the images of the poem. It's the difference between talking about a smoldering snake of peeling flesh and skin, and a snake that's been protected and horribly mutilated hands which burns the snake.
I think if you clear up this description, it definitely has depth to think about and dive into as you read through the poem. Overall, great job as usual. I like the structure and the style, especially the sounds of the words.
Wow! This is one poem that I am finding myself that I am going to have to study. It seems very metaphorical. I like how you told a poetic story of starving people eating their predators. Or maybe not. Maybe it is just an example of symbolism. I don't know, this story seems very abstract to me. And I really like that. Also I could really feel the grip of this story. Like an icy caress of the seeming despair of the narrator. Almost like a literary form of expressionism. Maybe you did not intend for this to be an abstract piece, but that was how I viewed it. But hey, that's the beauty of literature.