I will abstain from voting, but I can definitely provide some feedback. I've taken classes in literary theory, creative writing, and had some training in different schools of criticism, so I hope the contestants find it useful.

[quote][u]Metamorphosis:[/u] My favorite wordplay is likening the dead mother's wings as colorful robes, which gives a humanizing aspect to nature. In a prompt that inherently invites ecocriticism, this does well to make us care about the subjects in the work, but it also brings humanity to the forefront of our minds which is in constant conflict with nature. That's a good dichotomy I think. The formatting of the poem adds a cute little visual to the work that, I think, would be most effective if the piece does not explicitly state that it was about a butterfly. Perhaps continue likening it to humanity as a parallel to nature, and the formatting clues you in to the actual nature of the work. That it starts with conception, followed by death, then birth, metamorphosis, and actualization makes it feel like a fully realized cycle of life. Where it falls flat, I think, might be in the final two stanzas. Perhaps it was to keep to the formatting, but keep in mind that structure and rhyme exists to serve the poem, not the poem existing to serve the structure or rhyme. The penultimate stanza is conceptually sound, but it doesn't have the same transitions as the preceding stanza and therefore comes across as abrupt. The final line of the last stanza possibly could've used better word choice as, reciting it aloud, sounds similarly abrupt. This is not to say that abruptness does not have its place in poetry, but having uniform throughout a poem is important to flow. Experiment with more metaphors, symbolism, and "a single unitary effect," which is when an entire poem serves to culminate in one particular feeling or emotion.

[indent][u]The Lepidopterist:[/u] There is a lot to love about what was done here, and I personally have a strange sort of fetish for surrealist art and literature and yours definitely begins venturing into that territory by the very end. There isn't a whole lot to decipher until the very end, and even then, it's little so it's difficult to do so -- but even so, sometimes art doesn't require a lot of unpacking, and many pieces of modernist art exist solely to make fun of "high culture." The microfiction feels more like an exercise in description, as the setting and character were beautifully landscaped, only for my expectation of it to be nothing more than that to be suddenly subverted. I can see my old classmates spend a few minutes of pondering what the significance of eating the butterfly is. Does he intend to be like them? Is he just weird? If he smiled at the end, that'd be an interesting parallel to the genus name being "difficult to swallow without smiling" - and speaking of, there's an interesting trend of butterflies being consumed. Between removing the predators of coyotes, birds, creatures biting their bitter wings, swallowing the name, and the character swallowing the butterfly by the very end. Does the character see itself as sparing the butterfly from a harsh fate, and as a kindred spirit, would he too rather be swallowed than live in nasty, brutish freedom? The story gives no answers, but that its able to raise so many questions is a good sign. My personal preference would ask for more weirdness like that sprinkled intermittently throughout, but this does provide a nice and unexpected punch at the end that makes it fine as it is. As much as I'd also like more as another person said, having endings like these allows the story to stick with the reader.[/indent]

[u]A bit sappy:[/u] There's a nice little bittersweetness to the poem that I'm sure many of us are all too familiar with, and I'm sure we've all wondered at some point in our lives what it would've been like to be an animal or part of nature as some kind of reprieve from the burden of sentience. As a disclaimer: I personally don't like monorhyme poems. If you ever played the same key on a piano or the same cord on a guitar repeatedly, it wouldn't sound like music. A rhyme is a tool to denote parallel within a work, and if every line ends with the same rhyme, each line better be tightly bound to one another. As soon as you begin to struggle, and the poem becomes a slave or tool for rhyme, it doesn't work. My recommendation, in order to make the best use of monorhyme, is to experiment with punctuation and enjambment. Enjambment is one of my favorite poetic tools, and in my opinion, poets never use it often enough. It allows you to change the flow of your poetry and still maintain the rhyme. If you have hard stops at the end of each line in a monorhyme, it can sound flat. Instances of enjambment in monorhyme can be found in "Monorhyme in the Shower" by Dick Davis, or the famous song Willy Wonka sings while their boat flies through the tunnel.

[indent][u]The Butterfly:[/u] Making an anagram with your poem is cute and clever, and like "A bit sappy," I'm sensing a little bit of envy toward the butterfly. I have a feeling that before the end of the day, I'm gonna pick up a connotation between butterflies and freedom. However, an anagram cannot be the only thing a poem has going for it. You don't necessarily need a rhyming scheme, but try experimenting with metaphors and specificity. Poems are usually short, right? Shorter than stories, at least. In order to make up for that, poems use metaphors to pack even more meaning into their size. Specificity and word choice is important because it can help you paint a more vivid picture. Instead of calling things "colorful" you can use certain colors, or highly specific colors or metaphors with a warm and pleasant connotation, like cherry wine, dry honey, or churning ocean foam. Using multiple colors in your poem implicitly describes the setting as colorful without telling us explicitly -- showing instead of telling.[/indent]

[u]Butterfly:[/u] It's a haiku and it is short, so too will have to be my feedback. Haikus suffer more than any other kind of poetry of being small and, for that reason, need to make every word count. Metaphor is essential to packing as much meaning as possible into 17 combined syllables and having it really [i]punch[/i] the reader. Nice job in fitting calignious into a haiku, first of all, and I can see the contrast between the calignious sky and a colorful butterfly -- experiment with words other than colorful, as it lacks in specificity -- and how that might denote hope. A nearly endless, gloomy void? The butterfly is a splash of color I'd love to see in watercolor on a canvas. A good, solid metaphor can really bring this haiku home. "See!" might be a wasted syllable, not that its devoid of meaning, but it doesn't contribute to [i]impact[/i]. I already spoke of "colorful." How does "a speck of hope dawns" sound?

[indent][u]полуденное солнце:[/u] I don't know any Russian, so I can only appreciate what you have half as well as it deserves, but I wanna start by saying I'm impressed that you managing to keep the syllable count the same in both Russian and English. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme scheme in English, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it does in Russian. I fear that there might be a lack of vocabulary equivalence, as the English translation doesn't seem very cohesive and I have trouble pinning down the relationship between lines. Midnight sun. Gold, glowing gentle blossom. A sleep fantasy. Are they dreaming? Does a sun in the night sky look like a glowing flower? Or is it talking about a sunflower under the night sky? Regardless, I'm not sure how the poem relates to the prompt unless one of the Russian words means butterfly.[/indent]
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I gave feedback to half of the works here, I'm stopping for now, and I'll come back later to give my feedback to the rest of the entries sans myself. Good work so far everyone! Also don't take anything said too personally, because I actually liked reading all of them. I just hope to help everyone how I can along the way. :insert your favorite emoji here: