Martha Silano
That Summer
we didn’t have enough tomatoes for caprese.
Our sun-gold summer a bust. A friend said
your tomato plants are dying; he was right.
The leaves like maps chewed by larvae, by slugs.
We resigned ourselves to heirlooms
from the store. Delicious, I said,
almost as good, almost a summer but also not—
the floating docks never pulled by a tug
to their beaches, the diving boards
in storage, as if all summer it was winter, a strange winter
of heat-struck hydrangeas, an abundance of hunger
for touch, of opening doors, inviting in
the flickers and wrens. Autumn: here it comes, here it opens
into falling, into steely blankets, into the greening grass
where summer had been a Keep Moving sign,
a warning: Crowded Parks Lead to Closed Parks.
Not a single tomato to can. Something
went wrong in the garden.
Now, the maples are catching fire. Frost overtakes the mud.
I put away my flower-print skirts, turn my attention
to the flames.
Martha Silano’s most recent book is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). She is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College and Seattle’s Hugo House.
Return to January 2022 Edition
we didn’t have enough tomatoes for caprese.
Our sun-gold summer a bust. A friend said
your tomato plants are dying; he was right.
The leaves like maps chewed by larvae, by slugs.
We resigned ourselves to heirlooms
from the store. Delicious, I said,
almost as good, almost a summer but also not—
the floating docks never pulled by a tug
to their beaches, the diving boards
in storage, as if all summer it was winter, a strange winter
of heat-struck hydrangeas, an abundance of hunger
for touch, of opening doors, inviting in
the flickers and wrens. Autumn: here it comes, here it opens
into falling, into steely blankets, into the greening grass
where summer had been a Keep Moving sign,
a warning: Crowded Parks Lead to Closed Parks.
Not a single tomato to can. Something
went wrong in the garden.
Now, the maples are catching fire. Frost overtakes the mud.
I put away my flower-print skirts, turn my attention
to the flames.
Martha Silano’s most recent book is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). She is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College and Seattle’s Hugo House.
Return to January 2022 Edition