Featured Poems

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-hourfull 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.