By J.C. Scharl

“My heart is like a pomegranate”
as a simile seems a little simplistic
these days (even the meter beats
too neatly to seem true)
but nonetheless
there’s something to it:
how a pomegranate cracks
and bleeds a little when opened,
no matter how gentle your hands
and how a few seeds spill out
like little dreams, smoldering crimson
as coals around a dark core.
How more seeds cling
to the membrane in a strangled
Fibonacci order, so determined
to hold their place that each
is a little misshapen. How
at the deep recesses of the fruit,
so deep it is nearly the bottom,
there is a bad patch,
the underbelly of a faint bruise
on the outer skin,
where a brown ooze festers,
leaking its slow poison.

J. C. Scharl is a poet and critic. Her poetry has been published in Measure Review,
the American Journal of Poetry, and Able Muse, among others. She blogs at
wordhoard.substack.com and interviews poets on The Wordhoard Podcast. She
lives on a farm in Colorado with her husband and children.

Originally published in NOR 29.