is the odd bedfellows it makes,
Richard Nixon and I squirted cottage cheese
 
with thick sweet vinegar lush, how tomato sugar
waits to jump the bones of fried potatoes.
 
You can travel to Tibet
and still find ketchup in the kitchen.
 
With too many tomatoes, you can
cook ten pounds for one half pint.
 
Go ahead. Hide flavors I hate
like succotash and corned beef hash.
 
Comparing Heinz and Hunts always works
to ease gaffes at a dinner table of smirks.
 
That story about a sculptor, down on her luck, 
mixing water and fast food packets - tomato-ade.
 
When you fork the runny yolk of a soft fried egg
mix it in, taunt kids with popping open eyeballs.
 
When you’re ten, directing a backyard play,
you’ve got gallons of blood for foes you slay
 
while relishing the perfect red
of fire engines and the carpets of stars.

Mildew blights are coming on.
We’ve had enough zucchini to last,
well, to last for months. 
Withering tomato vines,
their brown leaves curl
and the sun goes wild gold fall 
setting off at an odd angle
and down too early anyway. 
 
I gather up the drying beets
from a crumbly sand soil,  
scrub and roast them,
slice them with carrots
with too many rootlets,
odd remnants of a garden
which performed well
enough under sunflowers, 
June’s hope turned 
in on itself.  
 
In that canning jar, leavings, lefts.  
A scaley onion. Apple cider vinegar.
A little salt, a little sugar. 
We’re back to roots,
digging in. 
Blood-stain on my fingers. 
 
Back to roots,
the underground. 
What we cure
to remember old hearts.

First light the charcoal.
Pour sun tea into pitchers.
Put out butter, soft.
Slice the brandywines. 
Hop in the Buick convertible,
my father pressing the gas
on the county line
to the cornfield beside
the weathered red barn.
 
My chubby legs stuck with sweat
to red leather seats.
I sniffed herd smells. 
My father demanded
I treat corn stalks
like ushers at church,
respectful. 
 
He examined each ear, 
rolled back silks, scanned
for worms, pressed a kernel
with his thumbrnail. He counted
the baker’s dozen. I held the bag
and combed the silks. 
Mom had the water boiling.
 
Now the moaning barn and its ushers
are a Target, acres of rows 
lined to plant cars.
 
Those days we plucked and shucked ears,
watched a boil roll. Doneness is return 
to boil. We passed butter and salt, 
fast.