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TOMATO Go back to the garden—the green scent of unripe tomatoes, a nightshade, a cousin to belladonna, the extract dropped into the eyes of courtly women to dilate their beauty. You are too young to know this. Still, your pupils widen in the shade of the plant—the black dots of your eyes unfurling like fists into palms. You are calm, though your father screams from somewhere behind you from outside the garden, but he sounds so close it’s as if he rests his lips on the edge of your earlobe. You are distracted brushing the fine green hairs on the stem of the tomato plant, breathing in its bitter scent. You rub mud over your slack limbs to hide, to become, again, unshaped, to stop this moment from taking root in your mind, to become a blind, burrowing thing. This is how you learned to till the earth with the rake of your fingers. This desire to inter yourself— return to a seed, a small dot deep in the flesh, to be inside the green, translucent fruit,  its thin skin, its seeds like distant stars, eyes not yet burdened with opening. No. No—opening is never a burden. You have only seen what you wanted to see, heard what you wanted to hear. What you fear most is that your ruined garden isn’t true, that somewhere the wheat ascends, the delphinium blooms, and you have walked through your life eyes closed and so never saw it. Fear your own tongue’s bitterness. Fear your glut of sadness so deeply you rise up from the valley—from the shadows of the garden— open your eyes wide, hear your father singing.  ...

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