I keep buying malum granatum.

Author's Note: you can skip, if you already know malum granatum, or if you don't give a shit about the backstory, hehe :)

Malum granatum is the latin word for Pomegranate, which ruthlessly means seeded evil, or evil apple, depending on who you ask. and it's true, it was very evil to me. I never looked that up until after I wrote this. I wish I could say I'm surprised.

I always write with a pomegranate beside me. I let it stain my hands, my teeth, my thighs, my letters, and sometimes, my soul. The pomegranate watched me go through everything in my kitchen. grieving, yearning, loving, being disgusted, masturbating, crying. my kitchen gradually became the most numbing and the most pornographic place. I loved it.

I wanted to cannibalize the pomegranate. Split it open and push every ugly feeling I had into the world through the act of eating some malum granatum that bleeds. That is not an exaggeration. that is just what happens when you live alone with your obsessions. At some point the fruit stopped being a fruit. I don’t know what it became instead. a karmic partner, maybe. This poem is my attempt while figuring it out.

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I. Friday. 6:32pm.

I have one pomegranate that sits on my kitchen counter,
heavy, red, uncut.

every friday night, I press my thumb into its crown,
like the way you pressed your nails into my neck,
but this time gently, maybe.
I did not want to leave a mark on the fruit,
like you did on me.

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II. Friday. 7.41pm.

it cracks, not breaks. Cracks.
the way your lips cracked on a december winter morning.
pink. pink. bone pink.

I think of your mouth.
I think of your nails.
I cannot stop thinking of your mouth.

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III. Friday. 8.03pm.

the seeds come apart in my empty cold hands,
like the prayers I kept repeating
choking me.
refusing to mean anything,
the prayers. the seed. or you.
now meaning everything.

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IV. Friday. 8.51pm.

I eat them one by one.
I attend my own funeral by eating,
Methodical.
watching myself burying
in something that tastes
like you
after a glass of wine.

wet. red. stubborn.

the earth refuses to swallow my casket.
but the pomegranate refuses to run out of seeds.
I can’t help it.

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V. Friday. 9.29pm.

the juice keeps running

down my wrist, tracing my cut marks.
across the floral cloth on my dining table.
pooling at the grout lines of my kitchen tiles.

white tiles. red stains. white tiles. red stains.

I do not wipe it up.
I let it dry hard, and
it vomits me the shape of your face.

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VI. Friday. 10.17pm.

it grabs me by the throat,
the fruit, the grief, the stain, you,
and chokes me on my own sweetness
until I go hollow as my bathroom grout,
then flushes all red.

it will not kill me.
There is no point murdering a woman,
who kissed the knife that killed her,
just because the bleeding reminds her of
her pomegranate or her lover.

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VII. Friday. 11.02pm.

I turn off the lights.

I peel the white membrane from the seeds
the way I used to remove your clothes in the dark.

each thread of bitter, corpse-white skin
coming away in my fingers,
like something I was never supposed to touch
and touched anyway.
like I touched you.

I remove it all.
every white strand.
until only the red remains.
wet. red. hard.

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VIII. Friday. 11.47pm.

you do not come back.

but the stain does,
on my cutting board,
under my fingernails,
in the corner of my dark mouth.

I find myself in the sink water,
looking like a sweet psychopath
who has been eating the heart of something.
the heart of you, the heart of her,
and calling it dinner.

cruel. cruel. cru--

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IX. Saturday. 2.09am.

they say persephone ate six seeds
and had to stay.

but I have lost count.

and I keep buying pomegranates malum granatum.