The title of Brown Miller's poem is already a complaint and a puzzle: «I Do Not Understand This Extermination You Have Performed in Me». "Extermination" is a cold, almost official word, the kind used for pests and for mass killing, and the speaker applies it to what has happened inside them. The poem never explains it. We get no date, no setting and no story of what went wrong, so everything has to be read from the words. What they show is a love that has turned into mutual harm, with one voice left outside, hungry and unheard.
The poem starts in togetherness. "Through the thickest parts / of night's veins / we crawled // clinging to each other." Night is given a body, and the couple move through it like blood or like something trapped inside. The line "we crawled" sits alone on the page, and the isolation slows the reading so that we feel the effort. Then comes the first break: "but you still cannot see." From here the poem keeps taking away the other person's senses. "You cannot hear my bones / crying to you," and later "you still cannot feel." Sight, hearing and touch go one by one, and the repeated "still" suggests the speaker has tried more than once. By the time we reach the blunt line "Nothing can connect me to you," the failure of the senses has become a failure of the relationship.
The imagery is violent and bodily. The speaker's "animals have died at your door", which could mean instincts, wildness or offerings, and the poem leaves that open. The speaker also wants to "impale my hunger / on your razor stare." That is an odd, painful picture. Hunger is something to be speared, and the gaze that should satisfy it is a blade. Desire and injury are almost the same act here. Bones cry and a name has flesh, so the body keeps speaking when language fails.
The middle of the poem widens its view. "We drop into craters of time, / rock jaws sleeping in serpent skin." The couple fall out of ordinary life into something geological and prehistoric. The jaws are asleep, but they are still jaws, and the hard consonants (*craters, rock, serpent, skin*) make the lines sound stony. Then comes "the tangled music of / broken shadows." Shadows cannot make sound, so the phrase mixes the senses, and it suits a relationship where nothing communicates cleanly. At this point the pronoun changes. For a moment it is "we" again, and "we / strangle our lives" hangs on the line break before the verb arrives. The speaker admits shared responsibility, but the grammar still places the damage in "the disease we called love." The past tense of "called" doubts the name itself, as if love was only a label for something else.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The short lines and one-line stanzas work like held breaths or flinches, and the sentences are plain and declarative. That plainness makes the stranger images stand out. The poem also barely uses full stops, and the last line ends without one. "My name's flesh // starving at your gate" leaves the speaker still outside. The "gate" echoes the earlier "door," so the poem ends where the animals died, at a threshold that stays closed. A name is the most personal thing a person has, and here it is reduced to flesh and hunger, which sums up the speaker's loss of self.
Judging by the poem alone, its significance lies in how it handles an experience people struggle to put into words, which is being destroyed by someone you once clung to. It never turns the other person into a simple villain, since "we" share the strangling, and it never settles into resolution or revenge. It keeps the confusion promised in the title. The reader is left with the question the speaker cannot answer, and with the sense that being unheard can feel like being slowly starved.