Proserpine

I.  Harvest

A carpet of gold rises to my mother’s back.  Over her stooping, a sapphire strip widens its rivulet. 

In a clearing, I see coarse girls in linen, braiding each other’s wheat-stalk hair.  One’s head sprouts a vine of morning glories.  Another, the tail of a razorback boar.  The third, a city with twisting spires, and swallows in its cobbled squares. 

Suddenly the razorback tears through scalp (feet first, then tusk). Two girls shriek; one carries her face. 

The grass opens like a steaming wound: Four sleek iguanas, an obsidian charioteer with eyes that rub the small of my back and a half-smile that would swallow me, jerking at its corners like a whip

From the far side of the field, I can hear my mother wring her hands.

II. The Queen of the Dead

Ash-frosted shards of neon blue where men go to die over needles and feathered blondes in tank tops who smoke Marlboros  in my bed when he thinks I won’t notice but a tomb is not a big place. Squalling smirks of boxsprings the one jacknifed and moth-frayed scours out sobbing from their curled backs as he gravels them like a dog’s tooth on a hacksaw blade (felted hammered malleted chords, taut washing prayerhands).  Now occasionally he will knock at my door with a fistful of pomegranate seeds, which my tongue unbeads from his fingertips.  I do not eat them because I wish to stay, but in hopes that their pithy cleft afternoon will satisfy my longing for something more.

III.  The Meditation of Demeter

in the fall, the gourds
eject from branch-crooks 

aborted bare seeds lie 

til burlap-faced farmers
drive them underground.

Everyone knows what happens next:
they grow to noble trees, which die in the winter.