Creaturely.

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's strongest moment is the physical contradiction in its opening: arthritic fingers that are "strangely strong." That paradox does real work, establishing the older woman as someone whose body has been reshaped by time yet retains a kind of purposeful force. The sensory detail of the spit-dampened handkerchief smelling "acrid and tart" is precise and earned — it places the reader uncomfortably and honestly inside a very specific childhood experience, neither sentimentalizing nor flinching.

The place where the poem loses some of its grip is the turn at "a criss-cross of love." After the careful, almost clinical observation of the earlier stanzas, this phrase arrives as an abstraction that names the emotional meaning rather than allowing it to emerge from the action itself. The reader has already felt the entanglement of coercion and care in the holding-down and the wiping; spelling it out as love softens what the images have made genuinely complex. The italicized closing lines are a good instinct — giving the older woman direct speech shifts register effectively — but the line "wiping the muck from your face" lands a little flatly after the more textured vocabulary above. Returning to the sensory register of the earlier stanzas, even just a word or two, might let the closing carry more of the poem's earned strangeness.

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