Ceres Grants an Interview

Abstract

Ceres Grants an Interview Kelly Rowe (bio) Keywords Kelly, Rowe, Roman mythology, contemporizing, countryside, flowers The media got it wrong of course; it wasn't quite a kidnapping;It's true, one minute you were humming like a honeybeein waist high flowers, the next a cool breezerose where your blue dress and white gold hair had fluttered. But witnesses who saw his red Camaro humping down the rutted roadsbetween the fields said he just braked, opened the door and grinned,stretched out his hand and you, my wild buzzing bouquet,smiled, danced forward, and blew right in. Gone, gone gone, honked the geese passing overhead,Gone gone, rasped the furrows, choking on a handful of seeds,while you sat with perfect posture on an ebony throne,turning, turning, turning a cloisonné bowl. Gone howled the wind, slashing blindly with her sword,gone for good whispered the snow in measured tones;You handed Hades back the bowl: "More pomegranate!"you demanded, offered a thin smile in return. There was no grand bargain; Hades won, I guess;he got his, and I went back to work,lifting the heads of odorless flowers from the earth;turning myself to rain and shouting: "live!" That's the way it is; on rare visits you sneezeuntil all vases are quietly removed; at night you twistrestless under the flowered comforter,on the canopied princess bed too narrow for a queen. You dream of work, of economies of scale, the movement of troopson a dark field, a black ledger, a crowd of howling souls;I dream of snow, of baby skin, lips on my cheek, the banking upof warmth, and in the dark, my only child pressing close. [End Page 256] Kelly Rowe kelly rowe received her MFA in English from the University of Iowa and has published poems in the Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, and North American Review. Her chapbook Flying South on the Back of a Dove was published by Texas Review Press in 2019. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is a volunteer attorney representing undocumented women. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.