A pomegranate on the tree has split, crying tears of blood onto its twisted roots.

Persephone sits alone in hell. Are her hands stained with blood or pomegranate seeds?

My mother always said
not to pry green buds o p e n - let them be.

Girls are drowning in such darkness that freedom looks like an open window.
Bodies smeared like make-up on the pavement.

Ophelia wan and glassy-eyed, drowned like a spring flower.
She’ll see no more male rage.

Men lusting after ******,
no thought for the daisy-fresh girl her mother remembers.

Why do they hunger so for our blood?

We ache as the earth aches
where she’s been violated; skies
beaten black and blue shroud their stars in clouds.

In a daisy-strewn twilit meadow Persephone, violet-eyed, watches
her mother and lover fight to the death.

Hades saw her, loved her,
p l u c k e d her from the earth.
Gave her his dark kingdom.

She rolls power about on her tongue
and it is viscous like black honey,
but not the wild sweet kind she used to eat.