d liquidates the estate Shana ross
In cleaning the house
The emotional terrain here is stuff
Impossible to separate, sand and sandstone, layers that date
Epochs of a life; it’s the small things, all the things.
In the kitchen cabinet a jar of tomatoes
Canned with my mother’s handwriting
The label says 1979 which means it was already old
When it moved with her into this house.
Yes, in 1988 my parents took a ten-year-old jar
Of tomatoes from a garden they didn’t want to leave
Across state lines to this kitchen that fed
My remembered childhood.
But did you taste the tomatoes?
No - I opened them, inhaled
A strong waft of my own inability
To tell the difference between
Spoiled, fermented, decomposed, rotten.
Later, I told my wife
They didn’t taste all that bad, considering.
She gasped and said I can’t believe you tasted them,
Which means she believes
I tasted them.
The emotional terrain here is stuff
Impossible to separate, sand and sandstone, layers that date
Epochs of a life; it’s the small things, all the things.
In the kitchen cabinet a jar of tomatoes
Canned with my mother’s handwriting
The label says 1979 which means it was already old
When it moved with her into this house.
Yes, in 1988 my parents took a ten-year-old jar
Of tomatoes from a garden they didn’t want to leave
Across state lines to this kitchen that fed
My remembered childhood.
But did you taste the tomatoes?
No - I opened them, inhaled
A strong waft of my own inability
To tell the difference between
Spoiled, fermented, decomposed, rotten.
Later, I told my wife
They didn’t taste all that bad, considering.
She gasped and said I can’t believe you tasted them,
Which means she believes
I tasted them.
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Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with a BA and MBA from Yale University. She bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a windchime factory, and now pays her bills as a consultant and leadership expert. Her writing career has been dormant for 18 years for reasons both practical and best discussed in therapy. This year, her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Anapest Journal, Ghost City Review, Indolent Press’ What Rough Beast project, SHANTIH Journal, and Writers Resist.