literature

Variations on a Theme of Persephone

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Published: Jan 20, 2014

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Literature Text

“Words, words, words.” – Hamlet

i.

All I knew then were ghosts. Her body
an excuse, pale and stripped in the vague
gray-white. Second-hand sheets. The room wet
with winter, the window she could not force
closed. One mosquito, wailing. When she tried

to date, it was Tantalus clawing for a low
vine. It was her mother’s halo. She existed
in what would not die around her. I like you because
you’re a smoker, she said. I bit her lip and sighed

ii.

exhaust. Her body numbered
inside itself what was not
her. She woke here from a Kindly
One’s chemo dream. Edith
Hamilton played my

garden for diamonds,
said Persephone would discover
nothing grew up in this dark. The hanging

ivy plated silver. The poppy-red
rubies snarled, shades of mountain
lobelia, azalea on stone. But the thick

iii.

skin of the pomegranate that broke
inside her mouth – that swelled
from somewhere. All I knew was flesh

goes to flesh, dust to dust, that the apples
came from somewhere, that the pomegranates
were born inside our mouths.