Tomatoes by Mary Margaret Lea
My poem Tomatoes is about moving to college during the pandemic and meeting my best friends. I was terrified about living with other people and disillusioned with the idea of a locked down first semester. These worries clouding my mind cast shadows over my first interactions with my roommates, but I knew that I needed to secure relationships to make it through the isolation I foresaw. What I did not know is how close we would become, how quickly we would fall into sisterhood. I cannot imagine my life without them. We have bound ourselves so tightly to each other, originally because we could not leave our rooms to meet other people, but now because we cannot stand to be apart. I am forever thankful to these women who call me their friends and to the pandemic, despite the unbearable tragedy it has wrought, for orchestrating the blossoming of our friendship.
Tomatoes
And I’m laying in my bed caged
in by love and our shoulders dig into each other like
knotted cherry stems
that I present on my tongue for them red on red,
cranberry on laughter and
they don’t know the years I spent sleeping while I was awake
to deny my dreaming.
But they absolve me in the catch of our gaze
and my nail polish on their fingers, and
they could know, they could know.
We fill our baskets—eating well, borrowing words
when we can’t say it.
And it’s another night and another and another
and our budding elbows and aching hands
melt me down shape me again in the contours of this love,
the life blooming in my bed