Pomegranate Melissa takes her name from a great archaic quest
She found smothered under free Tibet in a suburban attic.

With wisp-whip hair that gasps its way across his chest
She roots into his brain stem and writes a list of his flaws.

It reads like the Declaration of Dependence, and Sally Hemmings
Is that nib collecting ink, collecting dusk, staring pitilessly.

What started as a treatise closes with their favorite classroom snicker,
Shared as a sideways joke that got bent out straight:

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

So direct. So clean. Her manifesto lauds

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the heavy price of professors’ jests, a long-line sacrifice that swirls into
Split-open Hannah, the Jew, and began
With a gut-grabbing Heloise.

Too late, Melissa realizes that castration comes in many forms
And the ecstasies are little worth the agonies

That accompany as we
Traipse the touring trap of history, and like a metronome he churns between:
Repetition
Repetition
Repetition
And Fate.

First he slipped the host upon her buds, made of papyrus –
(It was an educational gimmick
to study Egyptian technological ability, which resulted
In a handsaw debate the wood grain is her one capped tooth
And the shavings his wife’s roaming discontent).

The two-man saw, invented first in Rome, birthed its way with snorts
Until necessity yielded to the copper of antiquity.

Now she watches the museum mannequins crack wise with dead eyes,
And fumble with the tools she once considered sharp. Look alive!

--

Look sharp! Eighty-thousand generals go marching, to demand
One thing – Allegiance to a slippery hand.

Allegiance to a dead state, to Howe or then Lee or then Marseille,
Who she loved, once.A girl of 7, seeing a wrinkly photograph,
Like a wallet made of hide or
Mold bristling through on a paperback,
Looking like the roots trickling down from an unseen tree.
before she learned what Evil was.
Before she torched her own stake the hottest.

12 years on, learning that fires are quenched with
Bibles, and rum, and saltpeter, she trades in stilettos for Starkey. Mother, I’m

--

only old and lonely, sigh his hamstrings like a violin sonata
Built for two; recited by the most arrogant chorus of Greeks –
The great inventors. Her favorite subject. Makers of High Art, low
sewers, Applied Science, central heating, and the hula hoop.

Maybe if he’d been Greek, he might’ve snuck in on a session
In the invention of Logic, or just smuggled a smidgen
Into his corduroy coat pocket, though there’s barely
Enough to go around these days. Sprinkled it, like parmesan cheese,
On his eggs – his nose-wrinkling little habit - and stayed objective. Clean. Ancient.

--

But sir, she blurts, all this noble struggling – is just to get back to that beginning.