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 SAMANTHA KOLBER

Heart Healthy 

Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.  –FDA

My mother loved pistachios. She would sit at the kitchen table with a Ziplock bagful, reaching in to extract the whole nuts and then crack them dutifully, one by one, with her teeth, so as not to ruin her painted nails. She’d pile a hefty mound of empty shells on the glass tabletop; brown papery skins would escape and skitter from her every sigh.

I should have known, this is why

my daughter now eats pistachios so fervidly

and full of heart. My mother loved other foods, too: matzo brei, the fried egg, onion powder and matzo crumbled into a bowl of egg whisked with a fork—I made this my own, but not her veal and chicken cutlets fried in Crisco, the sizzling sound of meat crackling in fake
lard—that pop, like the popping crack of pistachios.

“More. Nut,” my daughter demands

her chubby finger pointing to the bag

with the words Wonderful Pistachios...heart healthy...scientific evidence...heart disease...reduce the risk (risk: the possibility of loss or injury; peril). My mother, inhaling bags of pistachios, a box of Devil’s Food cake, Devil Dogs, Entenmann’s chocolate frosted donuts, whose black lacquer cracked when you took a big, healthy bite. My mother, the dark bedroom. My mother, the bedridden muffles, unfit words from her heart: “Get out.” “Leave me alone.” “I wish you were never born.”

This early morning

my toddler watches me pry open

the shell, snap the nut in half, making it fit for her to eat. Did you know that pistachios cause migraines? That most nuts do? My mother’s migraines took her over; made her nuts. Each cracked nut, each box of Entenmann’s, little loaded weapons upon her body. My mother was 69 when she died, of so many broken parts, but mostly her heart. Her name, Linda, was a song. My daughter, now two—Saskia— is a mouthful.

“Pi-stash-ee-oh,” I say, placing each halved nut in front of her, eschewing

a tiny death. I watch my daughter—or is it my mother—chew and chew.

"Shit on Toast"

Eloise cannot pinpoint exactly when she first heard the word “shit.” When she was little she thought it was another word for “nothing.”

            She and her brother would, when it came to that time of day, sing and whine: “Mommy, what’s for dinner?”

            “Shit on toast,” her mother would answer. Those were the early days, when her mother didn’t cook and take-out would appear with her father when he arrived home from work: the saucy Chinese food with crunchy noodles and the MSG that sent her mother to bed with a migraine, or the buckets of fried chicken that were never enough.

            When searching for snacks, Eloise would find a cardboard box in the pantry and steer clear of it, believing it was the shit her mother was referring to. It was Melba Toast.

            Shit, it seemed, was everywhere. Hurled from her mother’s tongue: I’m sick of this shit; clean up this shit; you little shits; don’t bring that shit into my house; you think I give a shit? I’ve had it up to here with this shit; I’m not putting up with your shit anymore. Her mother would drive off for a smoke—an exclamation point to her epithets. Her father never believed she left left, because she always came back.

            Shit, to Eloise’s discovery, was even outside, where she retreated frequently to find freedom and sunshine. One afternoon, a pack of older neighborhood boys taunted her with shit on a stick.

             “Eat it, it’s chocolate!” Three, big-boy bodies loomed over her little, all-arms-and-legs body. One shook the stick while holding it out to her, walking closer to where Eloise stood. She wanted to believe them—that the stick, or the shit on the end of it, was chocolate—and why couldn’t it be if the toast was shit? If dinner was shit? If she was—        

             Everything was nothing and nothing was real. She put her hand out to touch the chocolate on the stick. The boys stood in a circle around her, all in a small, grassy clearing in the middle of a circle of trees. She thought this was significant somehow—the trees and the people, both in circles.

            “Go on, eat it!”

            She was taking too long. She was already forming her own opinions. How old was she? Six or seven to their ten or eleven? She stared at the ball of brown mush at the end of that twig, coming closer and closer to her face. The trees swayed in the wind. The boys around her laughed. Eloise spun without moving. The grass was suddenly too green beneath her. The sky above, brilliantly blue, with those long white wisps of clouds, contrails left by airplanes, perhaps. Eloise didn’t risk looking up to find the airplane, but she wanted to.

            She smelled poop but saw chocolate. We see what we want to see. The tears came and she fled, running her way down the hill to her house, wishing there wasn’t but knowing there might be shit on toast for dinner.​​​​

MORE ABOUT SAMANTHA KOLBER

"My poem, "Heart Healthy," is about how watching my daughter eat pistachios reminded me of how my mother ate them when she was alive, and how, by my mothering my daughter, I was changing the narrative of illness and abuse surrounding my own childhood and the mothering I received. It was previously published in my chapbook called "Birth of a Daughter" published by Kelsay Books in 2020. The flash fiction piece called "Shit on Toast" is a snapshot of a chapter from my forthcoming novel called What She Stole, which will be published in December 2026. This piece is about a young girl whose mother tells her she is making shit on toast for dinner, and the girl wonders, because of other experiences and traumas, if this is literal or figurative."

Samantha Kolber is an award-winning poet with poems in Rattle, Oddball Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Hunger Mountain, and other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, and completed post-grad studies in poetry at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. Originally from Plainsboro, New Jersey, she lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she settled almost 30 years ago and where she raises her family and runs a small, indie press, Rootstock Publishing. Her chapbook "Birth of a Daughter" (Kelsay Books, 2020) was a 2023 Poetry Winner in the San Francisco Book Festival. Her debut novel, a literary coming-of-age about a troubled teen with a schizophrenic father and depressed mother, will be published in 2026. Visit her website, www.samanthakolber.com.

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