A tomato, plucked from an ox’s heart,
Is the same as everything else.
A sauce of its own raw body,
An ablution for other muscles, flavors
They can’t leave home without.
Like the trellises & trees above them.
I was even willing to eat
Countless badly cooked bowls of rice
In order to arrive sauceless.
The vine, a skeleton.
A tomato, the size of an ox’s chest,
Gazing proudly and westward toward a setting sun.
Who’s ready to be culled today,
The herd’s farthest day into the future?
A grain of rice soaked in red, tender enough,
Comforts me to sleep almost before dinner registers.
A bean, plucked from a panther’s paw
Is the same as a panther’s paw
Plucked from a dried pod, in mid-fall.
The sauce is a reduction
Of its miles
From home. The vine, an arm
In the skeleton of the garden.
Click here to read Russell Zintel on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Samuele Pieretti on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
