Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone

by kizziah burton

I will seek answers among the dead and ignore the living.

I will look for you. In the alleys, behind the dismal stores, the closed doors.

I will travel alone, an exile, a pilgrim, a beggar’s bowl.

I will wear black for the rest of my life.

I will scissor the fingers of my gloves to pick up the petals you scattered.

I will draw thick lines of kohl around my eyes, a mask.

I will conceal myself with veils and rituals. Haunt the crossroads and the morgues.

I will light candles in the dark, watch my fear molt into a skinless fury.

I will march that fury into the night.

I will suck spring from earth’s green song.

I will urge flowers, fruits, roots back into their kernels.

I will pat seeds to sleep in clay pots. Pluck bird and bee from the air.

I will separate every schist, bole, meadow, and gorge from its deep meaning.

I will enter into silence.

I will anoint my lips with honey and not open them to speak or eat or call forth.

I will set fire to the fields. I will smear corn ash in lines across my forehead.

I will be a plaguing nemesis.

I will find you, and on my way,

I will cross out of the birthplace into the deathplace, a place unmoved by a girl’s cries.

I will touch my forehead to the wall and walk backwards past the wailing threshold.

I will rummage the shelves of hell to get you back.

I will work it out, daughter, clambering down the steep tubercular surfaces.

I will understand this is a house he has built to keep you in. It is not your house.

I will find you strapped to the bed he has made for deflowering.

I will take you out of his ill-lit house, and send this robber fly a message, but first,

I will walk into its kitchen and take up his knife. I will stand in front of the mirror.

I will cut my heavy braid, longer than all the lengths of my rage.

I will never forget how the living braid recoils when cut like a girl’s body treated cruelly.

I will pick up the braid and measure the weight of a girl’s despair.

I will carry it with both hands to the dining table.

I will put one end on your empty plate and lay it out the length of the surface.

I will watch my hair turn from a gold plait to a bone rope.

I will blow into its twine. And crimp the strands to preserve memory.

I will light the helix with the Eleusinian flame.

I will whorl the fiery compass over my head, annulling separation.

I will fling this bone rope into a higher dimension, a genetic zipper to another life.

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kizziah burton was awarded the Forward Prizes Best Single Poem Shortlist 2026/2023, Mslexia Poetry Prize Second (2026)/Third (2022), the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2024, Ledbury Poetry Prize Second. She is a Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Award Finalist and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and Fish Poetry Prize. Her poems have been Highly Commended in the National Poetry Competition, the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition, Manchester Prize, Magma – Judge’s Prize, Bridport, Oxford Poetry Prizes and others. She is a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Poet and a Graduate of the Writing Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She won a Teaching Fellowship, three educational grants from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation, and a merit scholarship to study poetry at Charles University, Prague. She holds Diplomas, in advanced levels, from the National Piano Guild. She performed as principal on stage/television in classical ballet, under Mme. Cecilia Kelly, a former soloist of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Burton in England. A former student of Japanese art master, Narae Mochizucki, in calligraphy, 8th- to 12th-century Japanese poetry on abstract sculptural forms. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Religion with related studies in Moving Image Arts and has had an apprenticeship in directing on a New Line Cinema film, under American Director Lesli Linka Glatter (an AFI alumnus.) Burton is a professional member of Women in Film Los Angeles.