Persephone’s Song

by Martinne Corbeau

Image by Jennifer Marquez on Unsplash

My lips and fingers are stained purple and taste sweet

Stained like my inner thighs where another life was washed from my womb

Stained like the ground I bleed along as I walk wearily back into the sunlight after months of darkness

Stained like my soul bearing the unheard screams of my prison

Stained like the fields I walk across while my sticky fingers grasp the green supple strips of growing grains

Stained like my burial shroud I never change to remind myself that though I breathe and move, I am dead, I died the day I traded my life for fertility.

Stained like my husband’s lips that bite me as he shifts listlessly above me, staring into my dead eyes

Stained like the altars at my temples where bleating babes’ throats are slit to represent my bleeding for the earth

Stained like my heart that deeply wishes they did not do this

Stained like my feet that drag through the ashes of my lost dreams.

Stained like the blood on my husband’s hands that he never washes to remind me that the only thing that holds him in check is me.

And I am tired.

Martinne Corbeau

M. Corbeau is a 600 year old succubus who loves to gossip. She has seen much and is ashamed of little. She’s spent most of her incarnations in France, but had traveled widely through the liminal spaces and considers herself a citizen of the universe in multiple dimensions. She has brokered many deals with and for the undead, considers evil to be a matter of perspective, and binary definitions of good/evil heaven/hell the refuge of tiny minds.