Tomato Variations
Kate Kobosko
I.
We stop on our drive shore-bound
at one of the farm stands that wink
along Route 50, named after the people
who cultivate the green fields behind
them: Tony’s Fruit. Sherry’s Corn.
I can see my mother among the rows
of produce, filling a brown paper bag,
navigating by smell. Slicking her thumb
around a tomato’s flesh, weighing
risk of blemish and rot.
We will eat them all week, until the pile loses
claim on counter space. The fruit will wait
for us to trek up from the beach, shake salt
and pepper on slabs thick as cuts of steak,
the taste like a bright familiar sea.
II.
Shrunken cherry tomato plant
vining up a rusting metal cage
on my grandfather’s back
deck. The time I plucked
the green pearls from their stems
too early and ruined the yield.
How I thought the magic
of ripening could happen
on the counter, how I wanted
to save myself from guilt,
so I popped one in my mouth
anyway—the hard green bulb
exploding, metallic, inside me.
III.
Open face: wonder white bread,
kraft american cheese, old bay.
Five minutes on broil, oven
door pitched open three inches.
There are days I need
to surrender to memory;
to return to that warmed
kitchen and stand beside
my mother, paring slices
on a wood cutting board,
pink stains pooling
under the knife, sampling
wedges as we split
them from the whole.
Kate Kobosko earned her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College and has an undergraduate degree from Eckerd College. Her poetry has been published in Autofocus, Oakland Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and others. Originally from Maryland, she now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she teaches elementary school.