On Seeing My Childhood Home for Sale on Zillow and Remembering the Tomato Sandwich I Would Not Eat There
Big foursquare Virginian, back in fashion
and fixed up for fancy people. No more 1960
chilly bedroom holding sway over the back yard
apple trees, small fat owls staring back
across the swing set at night like lights plugged in.
So spacious now, renovated, what furniture goes there,
who goes there, not me or my grandfather smelling
of railroads or Nana bored with a child she had not foreseen
having to raise. Every night she rose from her chair
to open a can of soup, vegetable beef or chicken noodle,
and spark the gas flame beneath the pan, and I wielded
my spoon like a boat with no anchor. I was happy to eat alone.
She returned to her magazine in the living room.
But I would not eat a tomato sandwich,
which only mattered some months and weekends,
when we acquired in summer the wet plumpness
we did not grow, too much trouble, impossible trouble,
but the family, such as it was, loved more than it loved
the air or the giant pin oak or the long hair
switching my back when I shook my head violently no no no
I do not like tomatoes also not sandwiches not bread.
Nobody at my house ate much except on weekends
when my mother came home from Richmond or wherever
she’d been all week raising money for cancer research,
what a serious job she obeyed then, not a serious mother’s job
in that era, but when she pulled in the driveway
we could eat again, our priorities set right.
She would bake a lemon chess pie. We would break
the recipe’s code. I pressed crust into a shallow pan.
Then she sliced the swollen tomatoes, staggering dripping
red in rows on white bread, and my grandparents
sighed with knowledge I refused, the salt, the pepper,
the sprinkle of sugar my grandfather doled out like gold.
Today, was it finally the first tomato sandwich
of my stubborn life? But these tomatoes are finally my own,
grown in my own yard, fed from the bottle I ordered online,
I read the ingredients. I am finally tasting this
controversy swathed in white bread and mayonnaise,
and it is not bringing back my dead relatives.
Still, there they are, not on Zillow, in the kitchen
when it was bigger, the right size for us, my mother fit too,
and the old man of the house is holding out the open face
of the tomato sandwich and pleading,
Come on, baby, try it, it’s so sweet!
His eyes shimmer in the tree-shade light of the window.
There, elevated in the past, he is the better of us,
softer, more knowing. I maintain my status as tyrant
of small desires and stubbornness,
and in just a few years I will lift myself madly
from the attic and the back yard gate
where a lifetime later realtors pitch the French doors
and the big kitchen where I refused the taste of love.
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Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (The WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days (Emrys, 2021). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in New Letters, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, Action, Spectacle, North American Review, Agni, and elsewhere. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor-in-chief of the Cimarron Review.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 