the pomegranate’s decimation

Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen ↗

arils loosed from the yellow membrane
pith pocked and pocketed
spread across the plate Aapa
gave us on our wedding day
my daughter, my panniq, picking at the crimson
carapace, her graceful small fingers
examining each aril between finger and thumb
before she consumes it, just so
reminds me of crab cooked in winter
my uncles letting loose
their catch across the tile floor
the clatter as thin tine toes
chased us
and later the bodies’
carapace—craggy corniced interiors
the inner sanctum
the source of life
the sacred centering
cathedral
of appreciation
have I done enough to deserve this
I hold each memory
the December light flickers out
between the dark damp trees

I watch my daughter, my panniq, as she is this moment

Notes

Where Tomasz Różycki’s Ants and Sharks unleashed a savage, all-devouring trophic hunger that consumed reality itself, Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen’s the pomegranate’s decimation centers our gaze on an intimate domestic ritual, where a child's delicate fingers slowly free crimson arils on an inherited wedding plate. The quiet sensory bridge between the loosened seeds and the craggy carapace of winter-cooked crab opens a sacred ancestral cathedral of memory, revealing how the slow, tender dismantling of food becomes a vessel of intergenerational gratitude that questions its own worthiness in the fading December light. It deepens August’s theme of Feast through quiet, reverent appreciation, reminding us that the table’s truest sustenance lies not in rapid consumption, but in the sacred, inherited lineages carried within every carefully gathered seed. #poetry #feast #august #carrieayagadukojanen #pomegranate