So much for the golden age. I was not born into it. My father was a simple and hardworking man. People nowadays don’t see an inch for a meter, don’t glean a bird from a peacock, a feather for a wound inside the deep crest of a tomato festering, a creased and broken heirloom tomato, intricate tomato tunnel of which the only way to trace its labyrinth is to rip it to shreds, break it wide. So much for the tomato age. If the city were a row of cabbage, grackles would not nest in their craters. The grackles are dead and leave dead nests inside dead phone boxes, spitting shit into a wire-choked corner. Still the green leaves yellow and are Swiss-cheesed. The world takes its fill. Once the lettuce flowers, the leaf bitters. In the apse, sour crumbs honey, a broken leaf milks. Once the machine rusts, smoke fills the heavens. In my death, I did not turn golden, did not become a smiling thing. My eye might have been candy, but it was closed and pumped with tomato flowers. Once, my father planted a vine of cherry tomatoes at his father’s tombstone. “A real sonofabitch,” my aunt said, then tucked the plant in gently with dirt. I didn’t know him, and I haven’t visited since. You have to understand where I’m coming from. I did not live through a golden age. I grew into a withering tangle, my roots plunged nowhere and nothing, sown in a dry haybale. I died my death. I died again. The polis reeked of incandescence. I was buried below, toes poking. I never started a garden.