I buy enough to fill the bath and spend the evening digging for seeds. It feels lonely until I expose myself to blood and marrow. I have no taste for water. I am bathed in red as I loosen each one from its socket and remember the difference between loving and hurting. There are some rituals that only hide themselves so well. I know I’ve been good when the seeds have stained only the inside of me. I know I’ve been good when no one knows what’s happened. This is what a bath is for. The walls and floor and sky have stained beyond saving and I know that each seed I pull wants its removal to be known. There is no gentleness in love smothered down to draining. I only want to know the feeling of being held close—overcome in the bath. I only want to drown in someone so heavily that we feel the surge of the same blood. The burst of bitter fruit between bodies. I will leave the room and no one will know I’ve stained myself with blood run sweet. The pomegranates have stained the ridges of my fingertips. There are parts of myself that I can’t get back.

Sarah Hilton is the author of Saltwater Lacuna (Anstruther Press) and homecoming (MODEL Press). Her writing has been most recently featured in Hart House Review, deathcap, and Untethered, and she is the recipient of the E. Nelson James Poetry Prize. She is a lesbian poet from Scarborough who holds a Master of Information from the University of Toronto.

Image by Roberto Carlos Román Don @srcharls