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Tomatoes

Katrina Vandenberg

The best ones
I ever ate I ate

that summer, him dead
six months, me not yet

forevered again
to anyone. Tomatoes

the only fever, many-
chambered, jelly-seeded

—probably slicers,
nothing rare. Dissected

into the same glass bowl
night after night for a dinner

date with the pulpy sun
on its way through

my yard. Fayetteville,
Arkansas, city of wreckage.

Mozzarella, basil, salt.
Oil, the August air

humid, nearly liquid.
One evening I sat

on my back stoop
in a puddle of light

and knew I could live
without him, and was.

I ate the same dinner
from the same bowl

until the decision
ceased to be a decision.

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Atlas: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2004). A former associate professor at Hamline University, Vandenberg lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

About Katrina Vandenberg

Themes

About this Poem

“The first time I grieved the death of someone I deeply loved, I learned how weird grief could be. While grief could feel unbearable, it also made me feel intensely aware of beauty. At times, living with death made me feel fully alive. And, although my grief had a marked beginning, it never seemed to end. I just learned to carry it. ‘Tomatoes’ is a poem about the summer I learned this lesson. The poem’s short and often enjambed lines, and its generous use of white space, are meant to underscore how slow and silent, yet full, that summer felt.”
—Katrina Vandenberg

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More by this poet

Oarlock, Oar (Y, W, V, U, F)

still I hail from smokestacks girders closed

factories McLouth Steel’s poured slag turning the night

sky and black river orange the tight typeface of houses

in River Rouge Wyandotte the steel and auto tribes

tribe of the alphabet job shops the fathers who set

cutting tools on screw machines to make in multiples

in sixes packets of ear plugs the men made deaf shift

changes at three the line must never stop nothing could

not mothers who taught us the alphabet shapes

of oxen boats houses camels letters row on row

to prop us up row the ideas forward the spear

the snake the needle

Katrina Vandenberg

2012

Record

Late night July, Minnesota,
John asleep on the glassed-in porch,
Bob Dylan quiet on a cassette


you made from an album
I got rid of soon after
you died.  Years later,


I regret giving up
your two boxes of vinyl,
which I loved.  Surely


they were too awkward,
too easily broken
for people who loved music


the way we did.  But tonight
I’m in the mood for ghosts,
for sounds we hated: pop,


scratch, hiss, the occasional
skip.

Katrina Vandenberg

2005

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Tomatoes

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