Sachiko Murakami - pomegranate

Persephone drags
her hands along the tunnel wall, casually
staining herself. Her milky skin
illuminates, announces her
among the dead, their skin vague, and grey.

Hades leads his conquest
to a black bed carved from rock
burnished for her arrival.

This is the part where he ravishes her
but watch him hesitate;
she is, after all, Zeus’ daughter.

The fruit gleams
on the nightstand, obvious,
dripping; its split jewels
wink conspiringly.

They fill an awkward minute
with furious small talk,
triangulated, apparent;

until she pulls a strategic
hairpin. Her released gloss
spills across the bedspread.
She picks and wiggles
out a seed, lays it on her tongue

wetly: blush on blush

and as she swallows
her limbs shiver, cooling into argentite—

Elsewhere rages Demeter,
winter cracking with the fury
of a mother whose daughter lies
in the bed of a boy
from the wrong side of the river