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YOUR CART

Diana Whitney

Demeter in Winter

I swear I didn’t summon this
December shitstorm of sleet and pellets,

onyx nights and black ice sheeting
the bridges, rattling the washboards,

the Ford Explorer upside down 
in the frozen swamp beneath the power lines,

moon-roof punched by a fat tree stump,
frost spattered with glass

and the driver crushed at sixteen.
The earth split and death dragged her

into a velvet chasm and the jaws of life
couldn’t pry her out. Those teenagers

weren’t wearing seatbelts
I tell my girls, though it might not

be true, only a mother’s ruse to scrape
some lesson from the horror, cast a feeble

spell of protection over the beloved
bundles of bone. Exhaustion

is a root ache deep in the jaw.  
Relief is a silken rope, unbound.  

Fear is a poison berry, half-swallowed,
breeding paralysis and prayer:

not my daughters, never, never.
Through dark and deeper dark they crawl

into the belly of winter’s beast, peel
a pomegranate, ruby hell-fruit, 

savor seeds of the interior, 
seeds of another body,​

sweet juice absorbed into their budding cells
as I drive past the torches 

lit by the dead girl’s parents, the other 
dead girl with the wild blue eyes

and a shovel in the back 
of her bright red pick-up, whose strong arms 

sliced across the pond in June. Never swim a river
after three days of rain, I warn my two,

trying to scare the danger out of them,
make them heed the hidden whirlpools 

waiting beneath moving water.
I don’t say she was swallowed.

I don’t say her body surfaced 
fifteen miles downstream. 

Now I skid through December’s
passage on slick salted roads, my girls 

strapped in back singing pop radio, 
a fake wreath on the plastic shrine 

where rain hisses on the power lines
and a solar candle burns ice-blue

all the merciless hours of the night.

S. Erin Batiste
Diana Whitney writes across the genres in Vermont with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Her first book, Wanting It (Harbor Mountain Press), became an indie bestseller and won the Rubery Book Award in poetry. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, Dame Magazine, the Kenyon Review, Diode, SWWIM, and many more. A feminist activist in her hometown and beyond, Whitney advocates for survivors of sexual violence and works as an editor and yoga teacher. Her next book, You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, is forthcoming from Workman Publishing in April, 2021.  
Art: Still LIfe with Pomegranates and Knife on a Pedestal by Louis Marcoussis
  
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