Kore

Author: Kelly White Arnold

After the catastrophe, Persephone craves apples,

dreams of them, ripe green and gold and crimson,

imagines the first tart bite, juice fleeing down her chin.

They would taste like wild, sunlit girlhood, she

decides as she folds Hades’s tunics and tidies

the bed they share each night. Her daytime mind

wanders orchards in bloom, threads through row

upon row of limbs reaching skyward, fruit skins

silken with the possibility of late-season sweetness.

It’s cold where she is now, all mausoleum marble

and floors that must be scrubbed, amphoras and ambrosia

to serve to a man who would kidnap a child weaving flower

crowns from early apple blossoms. Her diadem now: thorns

and iron and spite. Her blooming days, withered instead

of nourished. Nothing grows without light, after all.

Mid-night, as her captor/lover slumbers, Persephone’s hands

tend warp and weft, weaving shawls and blankets of green and red

and gold, wrapping herself in wards against the underworld’s chill.

Kelly White Arnold (she/her) is a mom, writer, teacher, and lover of yoga. Her work has recently appeared in Petigru Review, Hellbender, and Reedy Branch Review.  She lives in the North Carolina Piedmont with her two favorite humans and one unhinged cat, but she dreams of mountains beneath her feet.