She bites the pomegranate,
not with hunger,
but with a soft kind of ache,
like remembering a song too late at night.
Juice ribbons down her wrist
in rivulets of rubies,
sanguine silk,
each seed a small beating heart
she swore she’d never swallow.
The orchard hums,
a low, bone-deep thrum of honey-thick dusk,
where shadows sleep in the eyes of foxes,
and the air tastes like cinnamon secrets.
There is gravity in sweetness,
a tug between teeth and truth.
She thinks: love is a fruit with a rind too thin to protect it
and eats anyway.
Inside her chest:
a garden blooming in reverse,
petals folding,
color bleeding into absence,
the sound of something unripening.
She is full now,
of myth, of molten memory,
of something holy and ruinous.
She smiles,
and the world forgets
what season it is.