Blogger: Alison Hawthorne Deming
Kore Press author
Anatomy of Desire
The Monarchs on Audio
Broadsides Girls in the Jungle and Rehearsal Space for War
PERSEPHONE SPEAKS
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
(--after Patricia Barber’s “Mythologies”)
My father was the Big Guy
Generator
Energy Spill
My mother was Cereal
Corn
Matter Sink
Get real I used to tell them
Ditching their dream
That I would be
Forever daughter
Picking flowers in the meadow
While they made action movies
Out of everyone else’s life
What they wanted for me
Was never
What I wanted
So abduction is not quite the word
For what my lover did to me
For me is more like it
Oh beautiful sin in falling
Under the rhythm of his need
And finding I could answer
Stroke for stroke
Be bad and claim my loving
And find the pleasure good
How could I know
The hunger would persist
Would worsen
Once I had left
My mother’s threshing floor
My father’s distant light
Pulled into the underworld
I forgot what lay above
The soil drying seedless
The dying Earth
Unable to revive
Din of lamentation
Not even the gods could abide
My husband too is a god
He struts his ass like a jaguar
His sex is an epic poem
He loves the dead
Because they tell no lies
And yield themselves
Completely to the future
When he fed me the pomegranate
That would keep me
Coming to his dark bed
I did say thank you
My goodness married
To the limbo night inside
