Size / / /
(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.