by Martha Silanno

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.

by Martha Silano

but now I know a mother can work in her garden for ten hours,
not know it’s her last day alive. Now I know
no one’s there to deadhead the zinnias

and the fever few. Even though the world is filled
with injured geese and gulls, millions of acres
of smoldering trees,

I still love cantaloupe, how it sits on the kitchen counter
waiting for my spoon to scoop its firm and juicy flesh.
Even after I saw a photo

of my mother’s casket draped with one of her mother’s quilts,
I still loved hearing about the field of white daisies
down the road from her grave.

The world is both the wheat plowed under to make way for strip malls,
and a sunset like spilled orange juice above a gray lake.
Joy resides in the mountains

of Styrofoam and Ziplocs, while sorrow suffuses my mother’s backyard,
its cardinals and finches, its hummingbird perched in a plum tree
that lost nearly all its branches in a terrible storm.

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Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. Co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, Martha's poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. She teaches at Bellevue College and Seattle's Hugo House.

by Martha Silano

You can be a good girl and not know it.
You can have a memory of a man-

made lake named Thunderbird.
You can be ten, driving in the back

of your uncle’s Triumph, listening
to Santana’s “Evil Ways,” a song

about a lady who’s got to change, the singer
getting tired, feeling like a clown.

This can’t go on on a highway to Luzerne,
the hill to grandma and gramps’ house,

a bulging water tower like a giant troll
where we found the fossil of a fern,

where I fell in love with a boy
who enlisted in the Marines.

In love with a soldier? For a day I was.
I was a good girl who had to say it:

I love? you, my voice rising because
I was shy but couldn’t stop myself.

Years later my grandma shared photos
of Kevin in uniform, a row of metals

crowding his chest. There he was,
and there I’d been with him and gramps,

at the edge of the woods to pick boletes.
Kevin, my one-day boyfriend. Evil ways?

Why did I love that song so much?
It was a big hit. WABC played it

on the hour. That opening drum solo!
Still sounds like the day I first heard it.

Everything yellows, wormholes,
is bulldozed under at a dump. Entropy reigns

everywhere except on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora.
Now we call it streaming. Could there be

a better word? Stepping into the same river
twice. Not quite all in flux. Flowing,

yet static. Like the mystery of the star
in the center of every apple.

The apple isn’t evil. The woman
wasn’t evil, didn’t have to change,

stop hanging out with Jean and Joan. She is
all over town. This can go on.

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Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She co-authored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.

by Martha Silano

When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums.

Cathedrality of mountains.

Relief of roadlessness.

That there are lakes impossible to reach by car.

That from this window just behind the wing, 20F,

there are no signs of life.

Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish.

Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane.

Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries,

the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?).

He will turn eighteen next week.

Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum?

Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot.

Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds.

The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs.

Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth.

Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour.

All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood.

Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus.

Towns scattered with houses like paint chips.

From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies!

Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old,

the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt.

The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood.

Between fluffy swirls, black holes.

When the binky and the sippy cup.

When the diaper bag and the teething ring.

Cottoned from above

like first tracks on Lynx Pass,

a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.

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Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (forthcoming 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.