Featured Poems

Tomato Summers

Summers hung thick and low
over our mother’s vegetable garden.
Sun-burnished gems sagged on green-spun
vines, huge dollops of crimson
that we’d gather up in over-sized tin pails.
We slept the short, sweat-filled nights
under the ruby dusk of their fragrance, dreamt
dark dreams about mushroom clouds
and ashes of death, as night
stretched above the sleeping porch
where we lay open to the sky.

It’s the sixties, and it’s all of us—the kids
of long summers, earth-dipped heat,
afternoons in the irrigation ditch.
Lunchtime meant tomato sandwiches:
we slathered the mayo on home-made bread,
cut fat slices of purple onion,
turned on Rock ‘n Roll KYNO Radio,
its news-on-the-hour full of nuclear tests, ICBMs,
reviews of the Emergency Broadcast System.

We gave away tomatoes by double-
bagged sacks—to friends in the church,
the Mendoza family across the road,
the Souzas building a bomb shelter
under their dairy barn. Still we unloaded
the earth of its scarlet weight, as we ate
the red flesh of summer
and looked for the world to end.

Photo: Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA
Judith Chibante

Beggar on Blackstone

I see him up ahead, just past
the heat-lipped curve of the off-ramp,
scrub bushes yielding him up--
a brown shadow that turns
into a raw blotch of long coat
with broken shoes.

            give to him who asks of you

Cars ahead of me are a steady stream
turning the corner where he stands,
cardboard sign in hand, “Hungry vet—
please help” drawn in black.

            feed my sheep

I’m not fast enough--a red light puts me
next to him, a new string of cars in place
behind me. If I were to look up, I’d see
the stubbled face, eyes shuttered down,
low crushed cap over dank hair, an open hand
two feet away from the leather seats
and electronic dashboard of my car.

            as you have done to the least of these, you
have done to me

I sit at the light for a thousand years.
Finally I lift my eyes to his as I hand him
a bill—the rough burr of his sleeve against my arm,
his long look of vacant alarm
still with me hours later.

Letter after Cancer

Emily, you were right.
Not that I doubted
as I learned your poem by heart.
But when it came down
to the diagnosis, a daily schedule
of radiation, it was hard to trust
that hope would stick around.
And when they spread cold plaster
on my face, fitted me
for the mask I’d wear each day,
I felt it might fly right out
of that sterile, windowless room.

So I’d like you to know:
even when my skin was charred
to a ruin, and I arose mornings
to leave streams of hair on the pillow,
it was still here, Emily,
that great stab of a black bird—
ablaze.

Find more poetry in my chapbook: Radio in the Night