Hi Lynda Miller 
Congratulations on winning Package 10 from "Save Disability Group membership!"  which was, among other things, three reviews. This review is for your sneaky little poem "My Beloved" .
Just a short pre-amble... Though I like to read poetry, writing it isn’t my strong point and therefore my reviews of poetry tend to come more from the reader than the writer! Hopefully you’ll still find something valuable though!
 Reader Impressions
‘Sneaky?’ I hear you ask. Yep, because here I was thinking I’d be reading a love poem, all romantically written with a quill no less, and then, boom, we have a cheater in the middle of the poem and a murder at the end of it! I do love twists in what I read and I liked how I didn’t really see this one coming. In fact, at the third stanza I thought the narrator was writing a letter to say he was leaving his wife (even if she stays through thick and thin).
Cheating, adultery, mistresses – everyone has their opinion about these things. Love is not easy and you can’t always choose who your love goes to. Sometimes we even manage to love two people! Your narrator doesn’t, or at least doesn’t now. He says he’ll leave his mistress but he won’t, and he knows his wife understands this. And yet he also seems to think that having the two women with him is okay. She is the mother of his children, as he says; clearly that’s a link that can’t be broken and I got the feeling that for him actually loving her wasn’t much a part of the equation now. Oddly, I was kind of reminded of the ‘pina colada’ song (Escape by Rupert Holmes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5_EIikdFr8) – couples who are tired of each other looking for something else.
Your narrator does come across also as a bit arrogant/naïve (yes, the two together). Here he is with a mistress, lying to his wife and not feeling really guilty about it, and when she pulls a gun he’s like ‘she won’t hurt me, we’ve never had any problem’. As if he doesn’t consider the cheating to be a problem. On the other hand, this also says something about the wife. She knows what has been going on but has obviously not mentioned the issues prior, pretending almost as if there isn’t an issue. You know, sometimes the blame for the war is not on the person who started it but on the one who could have stopped it but didn’t… It’s another way to view the man’s shocked reaction, at least.
As for the wife, one immediately is on her side because she’s got a cheating husband. She loves her man, she’s a good wife (well, that’s not explicit and maybe she is only in her own eyes), and she’s a mother. Yet her man is off with some other woman. She’s at her wit’s end and has gone passed the ‘we can work something out’ stage to the ‘you give me no other choice’ stage. It’s in our nature to sympathise a little with the one who is seen to be the ‘victim’. However… the latter half of the poem doesn’t show us a victim at all. It’s murder, fair and square; and, for me, the wife turns into the more hard-hearted of the pair. The final lines of this poem bear this out. She’s not running away, freaking about what she’s just done. She’s knelt herself down to watch her husband’s blood run out of him. I certainly didn’t get any sense of her being concerned but rather a ‘I just need to make sure you die’ kind of moment. One may feel a sense of religious fanaticism within her, with the fifth stanza ‘rant’ and also a passive aggressive nature. It almost sounds like, while she hasn’t been overtly railing against the mistress, she’s been dropping hints and warnings and so uses the lack of acknowledgement of them as a further excuse for murder. He was warned, after all.
Oh my god, I’m way waffling here? I’m sorry if I am but the more I think about this poem I see many more levels in it! Such as….. what if the wife was a slightly crazy woman in the first place and that’s why he found a mistress?
Tone and Mood
As odd as it probably sounds, the use of a quill and ink is what starts this poem out in a romantic mood. It conjures up visions of the romantic poets doing their thing way back in the day! The mood and tone, of course, darken as we get further into the poem and words like ‘leave, tears, lies, repent’ edge us toward foreboding.
Rhyme, Form and Flow
I didn’t recognise any particular form of poetry here, just that you kept to a tidy five lines per stanza. There is some rhyming but I couldn’t discern any pattern.
I loved the ‘wife | strife’ rhyming because it heightened, for me, that things had gone wrong. A good relationship would never rhyme these. But… I think you could make it even stronger but swapping the line order just a tad: But… the mother of my children | my wife | we never had any strife (I put ‘but…’ here without the ‘this’ because it feels a little more active and also helps to show the ‘but how is this happening?’ feeling. Just a suggestion of course.
As free-form as this seems to be I thought the flow was okay in that I didn’t struggle to read the poem and didn’t need to re-read certain sections. I think it could be made more powerful than it already is if there was more rhyming to it (but that’s just me).
Punctuation and Grammar
Normally I don’t pick on punctuation in poetry because it feels like poetry can do whatever it likes. However, since most of your words are in a sentence format I did feel there was some missing punctuation and excess of capital letters starting a line. I’ll give a couple of examples.
Here I sit, | Quill in hand. – I think Quill could be lowercase, because it’s not starting a new sentence.
I see the tears flow from her eyes | And know she sees my lies – I’d like to see a comma after ‘eyes' and the ‘And’ uncapitalised. But also, a full stop after ‘lies’. I think And yet she gives me a smile. would stand best fully as its own sentence.
I dip it – on a line of its own the ending ‘it’ kind of jars. I’d suggest replacing it with ‘the nib’ (or something like that).
I hear the sound – just wondered if you might consider actually putting a sound here rather than the narrator reporting he hears it? Something like A crack snaps the silence, | I feel the pressure Even in poetry it’s best to try to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.
One thing I’ll suggest above all is removing the Young Adult genre. Emotional would be a good genre to pick and maybe Dark, but Young Adult seems out of place.
Closing Comments
This poem starts off romantic and then descends into darkness—adultery, lying, fanaticism, murder—and it happens so smoothly we’re there (and start backing the woman) before we expect it. Even at the end, when the woman is quite cold-blooded, I expect readers will still be feeling like they’re on her side and not quite getting the real tenor of those closing lines. The narrator is complex, guilty and yet also a victim and I must admit I ended feeling just a little bit sorry for him!
Congrats again on winning the auction package. And... don't hesitate to contact me if something doesn't make sense.
Best wishes,
Osirantinous
 
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