Tomato Skins

Robbie told us it was like a woman
when we crushed fall-time tomatoes

with our hands. Split red skins,
leaking seeds and something sticky-wet.

We giggled, thrust the rotted
tomato-woman in his mouth

and asked if he liked it that way.
He licked the smeared, soured-sweet

September juice off his lips and released
a chorus of yuck from within us.

You tried to eat a dandelion
so it could be spring inside,

but it was too bitter for your tongue.
With our hands we raked the yellow

over our arms, colored ourselves May.
We opened the skin on our thighs

with razors when those fruit-fly boys
buzzed in, and we found the sticky seeds

of autumn sprouting inside us.
With my hands I pulled your hair,

batted your bare chest like
a nursing infant, desperate for

your soured-sweet juice,
so we could be those used and trashed

tomato-women in wet fall grass,

not the ones forgotten,
softening on the vine.

Like dry grass in the mouth of summer
I need something wet on my lips

when there’s an echo of breath in my ear
right where your tongue is.

Kit Evans is a 20-something queer poet and writer from Corvallis, Oregon. He can often be found meditating next to large bodies of water, or lifting rocks in search of cool bugs. His poetry has appeared in The Dewdrop, Hiram Poetry Review, and is forthcoming in the Beyond Queer Words anthology and Vagabond City Lit.