Persephone’s Veil

Tangle clots the sewer drain.

Fluids spatter your sheets—

last rites for ghosts who never waved goodnight.

A moth-eaten lampshade flickers,

casting shadows that twitch—

memory’s nerve endings.

The soap bar: cleft, sullied—

once-pure, now blooming canker.

The carpet:

strewn with nail clippings—

dead crescent moons—

aching to swell into fingers

that might grasp the corporeal.

The remote, oil-slicked,

passes between Cheeto-dusted palms.

Static-fed prophets

chant glitch-tongue verses

to spectral flocks.

In the attic,

a TV drones to ghosts engrossed,

slumped cross-legged,

regressed into infants.

Its murmurs bleed through the beams—

a hemorrhage of screams

(or is it laughter?)

You hover by the doorknob.

(Pause.)

The tea’s gone tepid—

milk blossomed into slivered scum.

The front door stays sealed.

Petrified

in this liminal purgatory,

you suffocate beneath

the weight of lives un-lived—

a frozen channel

locked in standoff with inertia.

But the barrier dissolves at dusk,

slipping into your alter’s nightgowns

through rifts in dreams.

The unconscious lathers like soap—

bubbles of other worlds:

petrichor rising from misty woods,

a cottage tucked beneath your ribs,

the scent of orange peels and ember—

mellow clementines resting in your palms.

For a heartbeat,

you believe

you could press your cheek

into the tenuous membrane

and breathe—

the portals between worlds

wearing thin.

Yet even volcanic, feral thoughts

can’t gnaw through

Persephone’s veil

between you

and

becoming.

Each morning, you reanimate—

microwave leftovers you won’t eat,

and curl back into the sheets.

The static mocks your name.

You remain—

a residue—

a stain.