Cherry Tomatoes by April Salzano

Cherry Tomatoes

hang in clusters on delicate vines. The plants
are caged, potted in the driveway. All summer
they have drowned in rain and hose water until flowers
became hard green cysts that grew, ripened and split
wide open. I salvage what I can into folded shirt-basket
though I know no one will eat them. Most have fallen
onto rocks below, dots of bloody pulp punctuate stone.
Wasted.

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Photo by Nate Dworsky.

Salzano’s bio can be found here. For more of her poetry at WIZ, go here.

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Root Ball by April Salzano

Who gives away their weeping
cherry tree, my husband wants to know. Mature,
in bloom. He says it deserves
a fighting chance. He will prepare
the ground, dig the hole by hand,
home burial or new beginning, we won’t
know for months. Once
the blossoms fall to the ground, pink
petals could mean something
other than what they seem,
if we want to search for metaphor.
The baby robin in a box yesterday
was pointless, he says. Cycle of life
stuff. Evolution. Food chain. Hawk
treat. They will give it
a nice size root ball, the orphaners.
It’s not like a breathing thing.
It won’t even know it has been taken
from the ground, not like a flower
in a glass of water, naked stem dangling,
suspended in prisms, shriveling, severed
from nutrient supply. The mother
robin is searching for her baby
that was taken home with the babysitter.
She comes with worms,
chewed and ready to regurgitate
into an open beak that is not there.

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Photo by Nate Dworsky.

For more by April Salzano at WIZ, go here. For a recent bio, go here.

Western PA by April Salzano

I love the state I’m in,
its mountains and cattle grazing
under billboards beside highways,
silos standing phallic in foliage, farmland
and stretches of nothing along ribbons
of winding roads. I count phone poles
and fields as landmarks, see the ghosts of steel
and loss of populous to warmer weather,
cattailed lakes and plenty of pine, travel
narrow bridges, salt-pocked streets in
my dogwood, draft horse of a home.

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Recently nominated for two Pushcart prizes, April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow, and Rattle. Salzano also serves as co-editor at

Dandelions Deserve Better by April Salzano

Dandelions Deserve Better

than the title weeds. Christened

with chemicals, spores fly

on mouths of wishes, migrating

over fields to land

in full yellow bloom, until someone

has a baby and its head pops off.

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April Salzano has published with WIZ before, thus far about Nature’s underdogs. For a bio, look here.

Photo by Rene Mensen (Alias 0591) via Wikimedia Commons.