The juice of a red pomegranate seed impregnated by the memory of its mother branch in the family grave. My pledge to you is exactly equal to the sum of these parts: one trembling uvula, the pomegranate seed of the mouth, three frozen fingers, the last heartbeat of the modern prophet, blue mercury, vinegar tincture, a tire blowing, withering, as it kills a porcupine on a Southwestern freeway. The majority of mothers are not human. Blessed is the girl who observes brains in the bloody pustules set before her. Blessed the incisors popping those pustules devouring the places where memory bleeds toward violence against one’s self. Heal thy self. Love the shadowy movement of thine own imagination. Eat your fruit. Fall from trees.

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Somewhere in the torrid fumbling that conceived BITE THE POMEGRANATE was the stolen phrase "Guilt is violence toward oneself." Pomegranates are strange membranes. Motherhood and religion. The apples go without saying.