two lovers kiss via stone fruit (with tomato interlude)

Eventually, you eat the last fresh tomato of the season: the last one that will ever be eaten from the summer of this year. It's still warm when you eat it, like you're eating all the sun it soaked up in its lifetime, like you're eating every hour it took to slowly grow.

The cherry tomato is gone. Eaten up. You can only press the stem, velour and verdant-smelling green, to your lips, your nose, and remember.

⁂

That summer we sold chef’s knives door-to-door
And you said, what's the fastest way you could fillet me
With one of these fuckers?

It was only weeks later
That I realized
You'd been flirting.

I’d be ready for it now.
I have eaten all the blackberries.
Where have you gone?

⁂

There are crickets and cicadas groaning in the late afternoon sun. The heat, stagnant and caging, has knocked you nearly senseless. You stumble to the kitchen for a peach.

Cold tiles press right up into your flat arches. You are trying to understand how someone could touch anyone else like you did and not go around thunderstorm brewing in their belly.
Instead, you eat a peach.

You figure if you eat a peach every time you don’t understand something,
You’ll make it through the rest of your life
At least slightly sated.

⁂

The waiting of my love is turning it a terrible evil.
Having spent too long ripening on the tree,
It's no longer civil. Not spring-blossom soft.

It’s rotting, right here on the branch. Too late now for niceties;
I want to buy myself a crisp white shirt to stain all pink with you.

That summer, the mulberries had passed their season
When we sheltered under that tree dripping fat with rain-water.
I want you like those berries on the bottoms of my boots.
I want you somewhere I can’t scrub out.

⁂

You cradle the cherry pit behind your tongue. You know if you bite any harder, your teeth will snap.
You clasp the small juice cup. You know if you squeeze it just so, the fine glass will shatter—bite into your palm.

But drunk on summer, you could forget those tiny agonies. There is too much heat-lightening charging up guts to remember something like bone, like skin.

The plum you’ve pulled from the fruit bowl is so soft it’s sagging,

And you’re so hungry you don't remember how it feels to be hungry anymore.

⁂

Where are you?
It cannot be my fault.
You should have known when you touched me like that
That I’d turn out like this.

I have eaten all the blackberries.
The case is plastic emptied-out exoskeleton
Empty on the table
And still you don’t return to me.