over-ripening 

some with their foreheads already bursting open,
at the farmer's market stand 
they sold wooden buckets of fading tomatoes for sauce.
gnats telling the red fruit stories 
of their mouths & larger flies hovering nearby
waiting to see if they would sell. 
mom & i would pass & contemplate if we had time
to make tomato sauce as soon as we got home.
the tomatoes sat there pressing into each other
demanding to be cooked down-- each a red planet
seeping with sweet acidic juice. telling each passer by
that they needed to make time for the tomatoes,
change their plans & get a huge metal pot
to make use of the fruit before there
was nothing left to do but give them over to insects. 
we never bought them though occasionally mom & i 
would stand above the baskets & she'd press her fingers 
into the surfaces of the ones on top
to see how much time they had left. the loose skin--
the stems coming loose--the rupturing of flesh.
the tomatoes felt old and young. like sleeping infants 
in a basket together all red with wanting. 
i imagined picking one up & cupping it in my hands--
carrying it home & speaking kindly to it.
maybe that gentleness could buy us more time--
maybe the tomato could regrow thicker skin again
& not leak into nothing. above the tomatoes 
mom & i would turn into those fat buzzing flies
& we'd speak in a language reserved for hunger.
we'd talk about spaghetti & we'd talk about trash
& we'd talk about needing the tomatoes' urgency--
craving the tomatoes' arresting language--
the instruction to make use of a body before you can't.
landing on the table of the stand as flies
the clerk would wave his hands trying to shoo us away
but we'd come back-- insistent that there was something
happening to us because of our proximity to the tomatoes.
the season has passed now & all the tomatoes 
at the grocery store are made of water.
these ending tomatoes were fresh with heat & sun.
these tomatoes had ideas & grandmothers. 
i wanted most of all to stick my hand down into the basket
& mash the tomatoes with my hands--feel their warm guts
between my fingers-- their seeds & their folds 
all becoming gush. no we passed by them &
at the end of the day the farmers dumped the tomatoes
in the big green trash bins for the flies 
that we no longer were. 
we were home or elsewhere