Ode to growing tomatoes
These days, it seems all I do is tend to this garden and feed this
dog they’ve left me and made me walk and pick shit up after
and dote on. The children, they don’t come home for dinner
or call to let me know and Mickee and Megan snap jaws at each
other like chummed sharks again. What’s there left to do. Knot
each vine to a stake and watch each globe redden and swell
with stretch marks. Look at how they plump–look, how I touch
and they follow so gently from their stems. If I set them here
for you and close my eyes I can see you chewing each one
slowly. Do you remember back on the fields the year we grew
one tomato plant and my brother lectured it was a waste we
didn’t have eggs to eat them with but when the first tomato
finally ripened I cradled it in my hands and you gathered your
hands around mine and we slid it off its stem together we were
so young then and that harvest the tomatoes so sweet they made
my mother’s teeth ache but my teeth were still fine then I could
still bite and break the skin so that the juice and seeds burst out
and dribbled down my chin and neck for you to lick up we were
also waiting for our children then. Now I take a cherry tomato
and press it to my tongue and I wait for the children to come home.
Emergency Room Tableau
Every day the earth grows a little bit warmer.
I think the ice caps must be recolonizing
in my gut because every day I shiver
a little bit harder. Soon it will become
a shudder. I already shudder out of sleep.
In my dreams, everything is always cold.
The dead lie perfectly preserved
on Everest and the rest of us decay, breath
by breath. At the hospital, the doctors
cut me open. Inside, they find a ribcage,
and inside the ribcage, they find nothing.
And perhaps because hearts and livers
and lungs are short in supply, they
stuff me up with cotton balls, rolls of gauze,
and little white pills that clatter
against my ribs as I shiver.
Cento for Clocks
Please do not die now. Listen.
Each night, I count ghostlets of how my body
has been pushed beneath the water.
My poisoned throat and blue veins
existing perpetually without air.
Only I did not die.
Only this and nothing more.
A thousand times good night
& galaxy & goodbye. Once I climbed inside
time but yes, the glass was “hello”
scraped hollow with a wrought-iron ladle.
I tell this as a clock tells time but telling can’t diminish it.
Clocks everywhere telling people,
“Please do not die now. Listen.”
Leon Stokesbury, “Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain”
Amy Key, “Lousy with unfuckedness, I dream”
Michael Blumenthal, “Stones”
Diane Wakoski, “Blue Monday”
Barbara Guest, “Roses”
Claudia Putnam, “Battle of Brintellix”
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Zeina Hashem Beck, “There, There, Grieving”
Jason Bredle, “The Idiot’s Guide to Faking Your Own Death and Moving to Mexico”
Sam Killmeyer, “When You Tell Me That You Feel Alone”
Alice Fulton, “Roar Shack”
E. E. Cummings, “9”
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