Freeing Persephone

Persphone and Pomegranate by Rossetti

This whole sad hiatus has been somewhat productive, creatively. Yes, I've been doing some rather dark poetry, but I've gotten some lovely photographs here and there, and I even managed to finish an erotic story and get it submitted to the Sex & Spirituality anthology that Samba Mountain Press is publishing this summer. Hopefully it will be accepted. I called it Freeing Persephone. Here is an excerpt:

"What do you want?" His voice was careful-sounding, almost neutral.

In that moment I understood with perfect clarity that the antithesis of death is sex. That the act of procreation, of self-perpetuation, was the only consolation my body and spirit could accept. The previous evening, in an unsuccessful attempt to cope with my grief, I'd tried meditating on the Buddhist thought-problem: If the only certainty in Life is Death, and the time of death is uncertain, what am I supposed to do? The answer, apparently, was Fuck.

"Make love to me," I asked of him.

And he did.

He began by worshiping my back, the entirety of which is an erogenous zone with a sensitivity level just shy of my clitty. Stoke a cat from head to tail and she will raise her hips, purring and kneading the bed. I became more and more feline with every scrape of his whiskers, every caress of his fingers. The warmth of his mouth and the tickle of his breath were delicious. He soon reduced me to a mindlessly writhing creature whose gasps and moans held an entirely different meaning than the ones just moments previous.

I ground my bottom upwards into him and gasped as I felt his hardness wedge into the cleft between my cheeks. My need escaped me in a low hiss, a sound we both knew well. He pressed my thighs apart and ran a hand along my flesh. My labia opened to his fingers and weeped like the skin of a ripe nectarine splitting under the pressure of its own juices. Deftly, he strummed the folds of my center, delving deeply into my heat, coaxing my clitty out from under its hood.

I ached with both need and despair even as I rode his fingers. I wanted him and I didn't. I wanted the transport, the sweet oblivion, that only he could provide in that moment, and I hated him for it, hated him for making me want him even in the midst of devastating grief. I was born of the fruit of good and evil, but I'd eaten the seeds of the knowledge of life and death and I wanted to know, in every fiber of my being, that I was alive. Alive!

I fought the impending climax even as I craved it. So he wrung it from me. Wrung it from me with the twist of his fingers inside me, with the jolt of his arm rocking me, and finally, finally, with the pop of his thumb through the star of my anus. I cried out as flashes of white lit my retinas and then flung myself against the bed in a paroxysm of pleasure that rocked me for a good minute, probably two.

I surfaced with a gasp, drenched in sweat, my body still trembling. I rolled over onto my back, pushing my hair away from my face, and when I opened my eyes, he was there. His eyes were dark, his face flushed with excitement, and his sex... Oh sweet heavens, it was so full of blood that it bounced with each beat of his heart.

His hand tangled in the hair at the back of my head, pulling me inexorably forward.

"Suck me," he demanded, and I did. He rose over me like the lord of the underworld, Hades himself, and as I wrapped my mouth around the inflamed pomegranate-colored cap, I felt a kinship with Persephone, trapped in the Underworld, pining for the world of the living.

I worked my mouth artfully upon him. I love oral sex. It is its own form of worship, of worshiping the divine spark in my partner. I gave myself up to it, to the sacred joy of it. I was Persephone, and the cock I worshiped with my mouth was a flaming torch, and the thighs before me were sheaves of grain, and the passion-blurred man presiding over me, he was a god, my god. Oh god, please, please, I panted, begging for the fruit of his pleasure. When he came his body arched and shuddered, and his hands forced me to pull back, so that he filled my mouth instead of my throat. He tasted like sea salt and persimmon, and tart, yes, a bit tart like pomegranate, I fancied, as I swallowed his seed.