The Shores of Temptation

“…If
Persephone ‘returns’ there will be
one of two reasons:

either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction—”

— Louise Glück

To support a fiction, that death is
undead and sorrow not saddened,
that the Dolorosa did not cry.

When my mother meets a stranger,
she feeds them, so as not to rouse
suspicion. He did the same.

When I left my mother’s house,
I did die. A part of me left my girlhood,
came back a shattered piece of that girl,
the hymen breaking into a child
I would wear there.

But the pleasure was real. All the rest, fictitious.

When I came back to my mother’s house,
after the pleas of my mother to God
for me to come home, otherwise
winter would not cease to end, I
thought it was all dramatics.

You see, she couldn’t bear the thought
of losing me, and I couldn’t bear the thought
of being alive. I chose Death, for a reason.

When my mother sees me for the first time
upon my return, she sees what she bargained for,
not what she wanted to see.

Not the child, but the adult. Not the girl,
but the woman. Not the smile, but the laughter.
Not the daughter, but the wife.

And the Dolorosa cried tears of joy, and a little of sorrow.
And her answered prayer brought spring back to life.
And her tears did not freeze vainly.

And that first plea closed the gates of Hell,
Melting the ice, so that the fire underneath that burns,
keeps the hearth warm above, for the grateful.

And the hymen, broken, bore the fruit of temptation,
in the shores of tears, in the spring of desire.

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan is the author of The Sea That Beckoned (Platypus Press 2019) and Young Enough to Play (University of the Philippines Press 2022). She teaches Creative Writing at Silliman University. She currently lives in Dumaguete City, Philippines.