Skin like roasted peaches and ice cream we
used for the scares.

No matter how hard we try to escape
we cannot escape the sun.  
We'll pack away all those stuffed animals
in the belly of a Greyhound bus and drive
to the little island off the coast
of Virginia where I learned to drink salt water
and lick ice cream from wrists but
we cannot escape the sun. Even in the dizzy
pulse of the shade there is still the sun
and there is still me and there is still you
-- oh it was only inevitable
that me and you would believe that we
could escape the sun if we could break
ourselves off a chunk of land like monkey bread and 
tell ourselves that we would play 
guitars on street corners now-- you would eat 
oysters and clams and I would eat only
peaches. We would plant the pits in the front
yard even though we knew they never grow trees.
I never tasted peaches that melted so
much like blue cotton candy-- and
we wore our skin like everyone who 
tries to escape the sun-- bare and shaven
like the meek pale flesh in the white peach--
cut open and waiting to be caramels--
we thought we were candy-- didn't we?
Thought that we could encase our syrupy 
skin in a clear wrapper and be candies 
sleeping coldly in the crystal dish still
waiting in my my dead grandmother's 
sitting room-- we bruise easy though--
we're not caramels-- if anything we're 
over ripe peaches drunken from the blaze of the sun--
isn't strange that we don't always feel our
skin burning?-- only in between the sheets
at night can we feel our flesh sticky and seared--
do you remember what it was like to kiss
with sunburn faces and rub aloe over 
our freckles?-- we were Velcro and roasted
and falling out of love slowly like
over-ripe peaches-- we never ate them before
they turned to caramels-- but it was only
fitting that we would kiss each other's sun burn--
tell me you love me loud enough to block out
the sun. And the next night we ate soft serve
from the lobby of a Dairy Queen-- used the red
spoons to apply the ice cream as ointment 
and the pineapples in my sundae stung-- 
and I told you I didn't want to share-- and
the aloe did nothing to keep me loving you
but we still kissed with sunburn noses
and finished sundaes that tasted like
the overripe peaches and caramel.