My Mom Owns Baba Yaga’s Mortar and Pestle & Persephone’s Pomegranates

My Mom Owns Baba Yaga’s Mortar and Pestle

You asked me if I was a witch.
I didn’t say no.
I just told you about how I used to make

faerie noises
and call it language. How my pockets
used to be heavy with poppy. How I still

have the battered cards my mother
gave me at 9 years old
and said I had magic.

I didn’t tell you I knew the second
my grandma died. Or that I know
my older brother is never

coming back. I didn’t tell you
the winds speak to me
and that I’ve found stories in snow-

fall. I just said I can sense
things. I told you how my name meant
Star of the Sea and how I’ve been spending

years riddling how a Pisces
could also be a thalassophobic selkie. I didn’t
tell you how I can hear the ocean

calling me from thirty
miles away, just that fisherman used to
use my name to name the water-

painted maidens they saw. I told you
my mother says the women
in my family

have a 6th sense and that I believe
her. You laughed
and said so you’re a good
 
lil witch. I told my mother.
She asked if I told you to go fuck
yourself.

Persephone’s Pomegranates

                      “We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
                                                                  –Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I’ve lost count of how many seeds I swallowed to get me here. His hair
is the color of night skies and everyone tells maidens to be afraid.

But what if I hold the pen this time? Do I get to rewrite the narrative?
Don’t judge the reckoned. If you saw a rabbit in a waistcoat you’d follow

him too. Just because I ate fruit from an Eve-like hand to hand me down here
to roam the halls of the dead, somehow I’m just a frenzied, fruit

swallowing victim. Somehow my story got morphed into martyrdom.
I was the dumb virgin-slut who fell for Hades’s

tricks and it doesn’t matter if he loved me, all anyone can seem to say around
their top-heavy tongues is Persephone, we’re so sorry.
 
Persephone, why didn’t we see you? Where were you hiding? No one is ever
hiding. The stories are never about the boys vanishing

in the night. It’s always us girls who have boys sweeping
in our windows. It never occurs to anyone that Peter didn’t steal

Wendy–Wendy stole her freedom like a thief in the night. But the story saddles
her with insipid mundanity as reward for returning. But what if

we stopped returning? Us girls can fall through the cracks in our mother’s
floorboards and it would take till the pomegranates rotted through

their clueless clad hands to notice the silence where our voices used
to ring. How far did Alice have to fall into nonsense

before you’d make sense of the logic long ago that you could’ve seen her, us, me–
if you’d just opened your eyes. Just looked. He looked.

The bedtime story “bad guys” always look. Each seed thumbed down
my throat dripped with the juice of recognition. He said Persephone,
 
I see you.
 
And maybe that was enough for once. Maybe I get to be
the main story this time. Maybe my name is the title and not

the adjective. Maybe I’ll carve his tree into knife handle
and bleed the orchard into ink. Maybe I’ll stay here with the ghosts

if only to hear them credit my crazy. Maybe I’ll stay here because a court
of shadows never shone so bright and the king crowned

with berry-bloodied darkness smiles more honestly than all the scarecrows
waltzing around above. Maybe I’ll rip Dorothy’s hot air

balloon to shreds, lock the latch on Wendy’s window– maybe I’ll shatter the
looking glass so Alice can’t get back. Won’t come back.

What’s to want from here? Other than a world full of mouths that won’t

Believe us.