Spring arrives with death still on her.

It hurts to be born.

–Emily Kendal Frey, from Sorrow Arrow

I’m preoccupied with the changing seasons and how different the same landscape can seem between the depths of winter and the apex of summer. After Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds, she was bound to the underworld. But then Demeter welcomed her daughter back by allowing the world to come to life. So, for a long time, the pomegranate has paradoxically represented both fertility and infertility. I’m still working out this double bind of womanhood and larger implications for how we think of the natural world. What I know for sure is that whatever is present in the world is also defined by its absence.