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Relishing A Green Tomato
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Relishing A Green Tomato

by
April 10, 2022
Painting of a red tomato and a green tomato
Red Tomato Green Tomato, Cheri Wollenberg

Laura McPherson is a writer based in Chicago. Her work…

The tomato’s electric potency grows from the carmine-and-ocher sunsets that calendared summer on upturned saffron buds. I spent August between them squashing snails in the humus as squirrels carried off the fruits of summer’s favor. Saved from first frost and set on the windowsill, a green tomato’s skin silvers like the moon. The fruit is as crisply bitter as the early rime that blacked the vine, the acerbic smell promising flavors like grass clippings on a September day. The moss shoulders round an inferior globe, firm in the palm, a tongue-buzzing inverse to e.e. Cummings’ perhaps, breaking the expected flavor of summer on its knee, preserving balance against the winter ahead. What could it be, if not the tomato in full? Season it to taste, to mask the bitter seed, and bake it to the realization of its potential, to be frozen and kept on hand to warm short January days and hoary February nights.
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Laura McPherson is a writer based in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Night Picnic Journal, Downstate Story, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and elsewhere. She is on twitter @silversatire.

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