Mary Ellen Talley
One Juicy Tomato
All the cherry tomatoes
split, spotted, bruised in baskets.
She asked that her gravestone say,
Here lies one juicy tomato.
Oh, rambunctious bodily fluids,
persona springing to life on the vine.
The pillow from her preschool class read,
When you go to bed at night,
all our hands will hold you tight.
Oh, for proper pH, added coffee grounds,
baking soda, crushed egg shells
into loamy soil with no blight.
Nowadays she could’ve flourished.
Green growth surrounds the gravestone.
Poems by Mary Ellen Talley have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Banshee, and Flatbush Review, as well as in anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Book, 2018), edited by Michael Broder; All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood (Sage Hill Press, 2016), edited by Elise Gregory, Emily Gwinn, Kate Maude, Kaleen McCandless, and Laura Walker; and Ice Cream Poems: Reflections on Life with Ice Cream (World Enough Writers, 2017), edited by Patricia Fargnoli.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem, as noted by the author, is about a woman who’d still be alive had she been diagnosed now. Write a poem in which you imagine what it would be like for a person who died of AIDS before there were effective treatment (starting in 1996) if they were alive now. As always, if you do not have a personal connection to a real-life person about whom you can write, consider writing about a celebrity (writer, artist, actor, activist, etc.) whom you admired, or even an imaginary person.