pomegranate

wind through coastal hills           enough chill        keeps pomegranates       smaller

tart            picked when thick skin splits           she pulls on crack lines            lifts

yellowish membranes     to read      nearly    undecipherable architecture    molded

to asymmetry         seed chambers          libraries of red       juice          between her

teeth       to swallow the bared seed         or spit            all other fruit          decodes  

like peach pits       split into clear poison        but garnet seeds       no winter prison       

each a word      in her palm        a difficult sweetness      seeps over tongue        her

hands over        its bursting ridges      or a paperback of candide       thirty-year-old 

pages        crumble edges        of her laughter      unexpected as      the past often is

Author of the article

Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation Northern Californian with a penchant for languages and their entangled word roots. Her poetry and CNF appear in Your Impossible Voice, Faultline, and The Ana. She co-curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her books include Paris Blinks, nano-fiction and Half Circle, poetry. She received a Luso-American Fellowship for the Disquiet Literary Conference in Lisbon (2018), and the Brereton scholarship for the Napa Valley Writers Conference (2021).