Jennifer K Sweeney

Pomegranates

When my neighbors left it was the way you leave
a stove in the desert a secret on a train
the way the sky grows teeth
after decades of champagne the woman
who had both the same first and last name
dropped the bottle of sparkling cider
on the threshold her husband might have
carried her over and though she’d hardly ever said
a thing she screamed goddamnit
into the night the RV loaded with whatever
they hadn’t hauled away
and it sounded like the one true word
undrained from the sieve of pleasing everything.
She wanted to give me the bottle
the woman she’d side-eyed as I raised my sons
next to her with more freedom than she’d allowed
her own now grown and unraveled with divorces
and addictions. I wanted the breaking
to be auspicious I could see
that she didn’t want to go
that something was making her I mean
it was the way you leave
a baby in the rain all wrong and against
the grain but still she handed over the bottles
in my doorway the two that had not smashed
then handed over two boxes of maxi-pads
she didn’t know I couldn’t have
any more babies ten years old they were
but she thought I could use.
I received them with as much tenderness
as I would a baby in the crook of my arm
and hoped she would be happy in her new life
though I didn’t know yet about her
husband selling the house to a bank
and driving them toward the nowhere
town where his mistress lived no house
waiting for them and when the RV trundled off
I waited until they were ripe the pomegranates
they grew but let rot on the tree each autumn.
I couldn’t use the maxi-pads but I picked
armfuls of red fruit it was dusk and the rain
fell softly an owl called
the slender branches bowing to dry grass
and I stood underneath them privately
feeling which ones were heavy with seeds
and which were already hollowed clean.

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Jennifer K Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, will be published in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared widely in journals, most recently or forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Guesthouse, On the Seawall, OneArt, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Terrain, Waxwing.