Tomatoes | #58

Tomatoes

I waited so long for love
and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun. 

Soon, we’ll make a supper of them. 
Salted slabs between slices of bread. 
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen. 
The mail piles up. 

Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us. 
Our mouths are full of tomatoes. 
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive. 

- Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West, 2024

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I have a soft spot for delicious alliteration, and this poem has an abundance. Hands, hot, heirloom. Salted, slabs, slices, silvers. Hips ripen. Mail piles.

The imagery is very physical — body parts intermingled with almost tastable food. Salt, tomatoes, hips, bread, mouths.

The first stanza serves as a kind of introduction, a hint at the past that led here. After that, the sentences are short and declarative. The people get older, but the narration stays present and direct.

I read this as a poem about enoughness. When I ask myself what “enough” means, I tend to think about benchmarks. How can I know that I’ve done enough, have enough, am enough? I practice gratitude, but often as a quick pause en route to something else — acknowledging a blessing or two without really taking my eyes off the map.

This poem has tossed the map over its shoulder. It is stuffing its mouth with blessings and basking in deliciousness.

I keep returning to the last line, “being small and hungry and alive,” because of what its opposite implies. If being small and hungry is essential to being truly alive, then being vast and without desire is not. Transcending human scale and desire is not really living.

I think in many ways, the idea of scalability as a proxy for worth has crept from the tech and business world into how we think about ourselves. Or, I should say, into how I think about myself. I should have impact and reach, I should affect systems. I have to remind myself that those goals — while not impossible or wrong — aren’t very human. We are not scalable bodies. We are mouths and hands and hips and beards. We age. We crave salted tomatoes on bread.

Realistically, I’m not letting go of the map any time soon. But I wonder what it would look like to relish my smallness instead of lamenting it, or to savor hunger instead of resenting it. I wonder what it would feel like to be a little less beholden to the mail and the phone and a little more attuned to love and my body and the garden. If I’m going to be busy anyway, I’d like to be busy being alive.

Full of tomatoes,

Jess