A Fruit Can Be a Metonym for a Home Country

and a tomato is the metonym for my childhood—
my father spreading cow manure,
saying when the seeds

get a whiff of that stench they’ll jump clear out of the ground.
I believed him, believed everything he told me,
including that he loved me,

including, when he let me drop three seeds into each hole,
he’d never raise his voice, never call me dumb bunny
again. What else but a tomato? To savor one

is to understand tomatoes were considered poisonous
until the 1600s, that tomato sauce was born
in Naples, birthplace

of my father’s father, soil of my father’s roots.
Tomato because my father loved them more
than his children, the proof being

that when our kickball landed in his garden,
snapped a seedling stem, he pulled out
his pocketknife, slit the ball in two.

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Martha Silano’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Previous collections include Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, also from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and Colorado Review, among others. Honors include the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She teaches at Bellevue College. Learn more at marthasilano.net.