THE SUMMER IS NEARLY HERETHE SUMMER IS NEARLY HERE

Ripe Plaid Skirts
Pink summer air
Climbs the well
And swirls beneath
our plaid-little-pleated-
Things-we-roll-up-short
So (you know, my friends & I,
Who are extra sexy
For no other reason
Than for good Hell)
- We can especially feel
The gold sparkles
Like the hormones of June
That rise to the
Senior corridor
To tell me
Soon, soon
Ripening is upon the dreary.

Fassion
I'd like to try a body like my body,
Brown like my skin
Dread like my head,
Who shines bright light from his smiles when happy,
And moves his tongue like my tongue skips
Over words when laughing over shit he's talking.
Maybe someone with a body like his body.
I'm tired of white plain bodies
Pink and yellow pinched
Wrinkled with the left over bronze of intentional skin damage.
I never liked them chocolate or coconut.
I've never succumbed to the warmth of brown,
What some might kill me for having and what others would kill to have.
I've never been with a body that matched my own sea-salt tone,
But I'm thinking of this one grain of sand I've found.
Yes,
I would like somebody who is very much like my familiar tan body
So I can compare our taste and smell
And see why everybody else wants
What I have been so avoiding.

Conch Shells
I miss putting conch shells
Against the pocket of my belly.
Sometimes, when I lay on the beach,
They find their way over
And flirt beneath my blouse.
I visit many beaches
Searching for one just right.
When I find it
I'll hold it tight in my hand
And rub it across my face
And I'll say as it passes my lips
How it will be Honored by me Forever.

Farewell Sand
Scratch meh head and it snows the white hot dust
And the wet grains stuck in the creases of my pussy
Become even more impossible.
I taste I am saltier
Warm pink folds
Speak endless endlessly to the shells I see beside me.
My friend
Whom I always find
No matter what foreign city
The water draws me
And we speak and walk and smile
When we run together we are whole
And when we fuck
We may open a bit of heaven
Oooh they love to watch
The crustaceans
The slippery emotionless anscestors
The winged death
Drool as they long for salt and me
Can't we each play a vicarious game
And I promise life will be eternally here
Drenched in our afterbirth.

Debra Ifill
(biography/all stories)