Under Heaven
Find a market that sells a pomegranate
in early summer, and you find a place
that doesn’t understand how appetite
has a season, how it takes the careful
cultivation of months for its many-chambered
heart to find fullness, a climate both steady and dry
to swell blossoms to galaxies wrapped in taut peel.
What true connoisseur hurries desire
or endures the pith, the grain-grind of seed
absent the anticipation of the small explosion
from the aril that purples the tongue?
—Anne M. Doe Overstreet, from Delicate Machinery Suspended
T.S. Poetry Press, 2011
