(To Serve in Hell)

Persephone makes an exquisite cranberry sauce.

Only the living can taste it,

but after you've had it you're hers.

She starts with white cranberries,

which she harvests herself from the marsh

where the Rivers of Forgetfulness

wash up the last thoughts of the dead.

Since sugar is still rationed there,

she adds strained beets and

p o m e g r a n a t e seeds.

Thanksgiving in Hades

tastes like a childhood memory

from somebody else's past

that you yourself can savor

only once.