Kurt Cole Eidsvig – Seasonal

Kurt Cole Eidsvig’s poem Seasonal is an ode to the goddess Persephone whose twin connections to both spring and death provide the framework for a personal connection to distance, love, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us are closed off and isolated today at the same time as the world around us is in bloom; our desire for reaching out and touching from the limits of confinement have, according to the Key West-based poet, ‘turned us into armies of the goddess.’

Seasonal

We forget when Persephone
comes back
in winter she’s the orgasmic
dictator of fist clutches
regaining exhales on our
sheets. She says, you don’t
understand. He isn’t anything
like you.

She leaves and returns and learns
only one and one can add to one of us.

We see the world as plays and movies
because our favorite actress beckons eyes
in ivory nightslips; her candy skin as thin

and sweet as lilies bending over
and reflecting in the tv screen, thick
and thicker with soaked up solutions.

We can’t eat or sleep
or shake the stain of headaches
until our single needs are solved here.

Her lashes cast in nets and get
the corners turned of mouths. Of course
you always knew this was forever.
Our twin delicious predicaments resound

in songs or sounds or promises you
couldn’t help but trust. They’re flames;
the pomegranate seeds. They’re flames.

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Kurt Cole Eidsvig

Kurt Cole Eidsvig’s work spans poetry, fiction, art criticism, and visual arts. His columns and series have been featured in publications like Whitehot Magazine, Big Red & Shiny, ArtsAmerica, SpinRecords, and Examiner.com. His work has also been included in The Boston Globe, Slipstream, Hanging Loose, Poets Reading the News, and Borderlands. Eidsvig has taught art and writing at UMASS Boston, the University of Montana, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and has won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Award, and the Edmund Freeman Award. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, he is the author of the books Drowning Girl (Unsolicited Press, 2024), The Simple Art Of Murder (Broadstone Books, 2024), Art Official (Terror House Press, 2023), OxyContin for Breakfast (Main Street Rag, 2023), and Pop x Poetry (KCEMCS, 2021). His visual art is part of numerous commercial and private collections and has been included in solo and group exhibitions. With deep Boston and Montana roots, he lives and works in Key West, Florida. More information can be found at EidsvigArt.com.