Adie Marg

 

At the supermarket I buy a pomegranate
To feel closer to my mother;
When I visit she asks if I eat the seeds
They’re packed full of vitamins she adds them to everything
Hopeful for some bud to sprout, a senescence warrior.

It sits on my counter for a week,
The flesh growing tighter around the pulp
Like my voice on the phone rubbing against frustration
Fueled by her inability to hold complexity.

Today I quarter it and starting with a spoon
Spatter red blisters in a white bowl,
The red staining everything:
My fingers, the counter, the floor, my shirt.

I pry apart the clusters with my fingers
Like a surgeon going in for a tumour.

I like that glistening red wet softness
Hides a hard middle.
The flesh tells you it’s ready
But the middle stays hard,
Long after giving in to rot.
Is this where love lies?

At the market I think
I’ll have something to talk to my mother about;
It’ll bring us closer for an aching moment
I can form into memory,
A moment to build into other moments,
All rubbing up against each other ripening
Into something beyond guilt.

 

Return to Fall Issue Volume 11.1

 

 

Adie is a writer living and working in Toronto. Her poetry fixates on the murky boundaries of the physical body and the way liminality, interdependence, high-density living and the gaze can de/territorialize those boundaries. Her poems have been published in The Continuist: Ryerson’s Creative Collective.