The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  With each inhalation, my reflection relaxes—like a cat circling and kneading a nest before settling down, sighing, content.

  Imagine pain as tendrils of smoke, exhaled, piping up in one white, faded corner of the room, coalescing around a light-saving bulb. The fan is always on, buzzing the wispy gray contrails into oblivion. Beautiful and ethereal.

  My lover is patient. He understands the smoke is also a signal, a nod to the universe that something beyond my control possesses my body, my psyche. I am part shaman when I lift the colorful pipe; I am part dying woman when I take its heat into my lungs.

  Every breath resurrects me. Every kiss brings a kind of grace.

  WHERE SCARS RESIDE

  Major Jackson

  1

  January, ten kilometers southwest of Oaxaca City, smack-dab in the middle of the Monte Albán—where the Zapotecs over the course of a thousand years flattened a mountain to build a city. You are here for a week to lead a poetry workshop, but first you and the other participants survey these epically old temples, tombs, and ceremonial platforms accessed predominantly by way of extreme ascents up steep pyramidal steps. The sun stings your eyes even with shades. And here, in the center of the Great Plaza, squinting, you gaze upon a couple in their early thirties kissing for five minutes or more, one of those breathless, deep-in-it kisses, one of those the-world-swirls-around-us-and-we-might-as-well-be-its-sole-inhabitants kisses. They are fashionably dressed, maybe too done up for the climb, the ancient red and beige dirt coating everyone’s shoes and feet: he in slacks and a sky-blue short-sleeve and she in a cream silk blouse and burgundy print wraparound skirt. Their intimacy so dissonant, you look around in search of a film crew: a script supervisor, a director, a costume designer. Both wear straw hats, which she holds to her head whenever a gust of wind occasionally sweeps across their bodies as though buffeting them. Just when the edges of their bodies begin to blur in the rippling heat, they pause and take each other in, their eyes dissolving. Cut.

  2

  Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman once reported in an interview: I have maintained open channels to my childhood. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was . . . the sudden aggressivity of the adult world, the terror of the unknown, and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.

  3

  Daily you walk into your childhood of violence, like a sequence in a film seen too many times that becomes your dream. Except this was your home, among potted plants and a vitrine cabinet of rare china: the dull smack of your drunk grandfather, who raised you like his when your teen parents could not, hitting your grandmother, and she fighting back with all the might her Jesus could muster those whiskey-heavy nights. Then, the only other sound: their tortured breathing and her cowering, balling up like a loose fist to fend his last blows; their bodies indistinguishable. You took it in, especially Friday evenings when late arrival from work and one of the local speakeasys was guaranteed, and it became your air, choking you, too, on the exhale until the next morning, finally awakening to the bright rustle of the kitchen to find them at a red Formica table laughing, she kissing the top of his head as she slid behind him, simultaneously reaching for burnt toast, everything is as it was.

  4

  Their remoteness stretches over ancient pebbles, a mystical isolation by their own directing, an open-air music of touch that announces more love than desire, all underscored by a deluge of sunlight which feels Mediterranean in mood. No one bothers them. For the most part, no one takes a second notice, despite the passing minutes of uninterrupted, slow head swirl and lip press. It’s a Monday. Only two other small groups are here; the vastness of the land makes it seem you are few in number. Speaking in various languages, visitors saunter by; others cast sideways glances, never too distasteful, just enough to gather unto themselves this sacred act on sacred ground, among the shadows banyan trees make and leaning slabs of stone portraying castrated men, in the presence of the dead waiting out once more this invasion of the living, wishing they, too, could once again press themselves into the shape of a beloved, wishing they, too, could maintain channels.

  5

  One Saturday afternoon, you watch a late-teenage boy, slightly older than you, in a white ribbed tank top, along with his four sisters and mother, move boxes out of a beat-up Chrysler into the three-story row home at the corner of your street, vacant for several years. You never learn their names. Your friend Curt sits across the street and catcalls to one of the girls, the one with the slick ponytail down her back. After getting his designer sneakers snatched off his feet last spring, he has been lifting weights, bulking up into a walking wall of human meat. “Girl, you fine as daylight. Come over here. I want to be your sky.” Despite her smiles and giggles, her older brother, ignoring how flattered she is, warns him to back off. “Or what?” says Curt. “Imma kick your . . . !” This goes on for half an hour, the brother unloading floor lamps, hangers, prepackaged food, a laundry basket full of cleaning supplies while defending his sister’s honor from sexual taunts until Curt says finally and offhandedly, “Let’s go,” meaning let’s get it on.

  6

  Your grandfather is trembling as he loads the chambers of his .357 Magnum, which he has just retrieved from his army-issued footlocker. Your grandmother is in front of him, pleading with him not to go out. His only surviving sister Margaret just called to say her husband James beat her up again, pretty badly. “Cille!” your grandfather says. “I’m just going over there to scare him. Dammit, woman, get out of my way!”

  7

  How do they do this? Both make their way to the center of the street, with Curt taking off his shirt careful not to break his trot, speeding up slightly such that when he arrives his right fist, firm and close to his shoulders, unloads into, less a punch into the man’s left jaw and side of his face, but more a meeting of his perspiring body with that of the other man’s, who crumples unconscious on the asphalt, a clash erotic and intoxicating as a kiss as much as it is frighteningly repulsive. He stands above his victim quietly, heavily breathing, his brute face scanning the streets and neighbors who have assembled around him. All of your life, you think of that one fluid motion of power, terrorized by the fact we are capable of such collisions, such harm, such leveling of each other to flattened mountains, left to tunnel into ourselves, such wretched unhappiness, such unfathomable cruelty unless resurrected by the tenderness and affection of a lover, by kisses that leave us enthroned.

  8

  Such gentleness of touch when they breathe together. Like always in the presence of couples seeming to take plunges into a beloved’s body, you are stuck, unable to turn away. Their kiss heals all around them. It is like Stevens’s jar in Tennessee: it takes dominion everywhere.

  9

  In Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne tells Johan: “Sometimes it grieves me that I have never loved anyone. I don’t think I have ever been loved either. It really distresses me.”

  Sometimes we go through doors.

  10

  In this land far from home, you squint and stare at a young couple kissing. Their love reaches somewhere deep inside you that needs healing, where scars reside. You convince yourself they want an audience; they need onlookers to bear witness, to receive and complete the endowment of the love between them. You can sense their chests beating, see from here their eyes opening and closing in wonder. You are less awed by these ancient temples where Zapotec priests performed human sacrifice. You are awed by a man and woman kissing countering the traumatic violence in our lives, the emptiness, all the blood and grieving spilled over the Earth.

  A SYMPHONY IN RAIN

  Kazim Ali

  Here now under the accumulating pile of ash from when the cathedrals lay down and rain wrote itself across the sky.

  Drawn across the strings, how can you sing blue thread into pools spooling.

  Ghost lover rejoin me. Sense me an
d send me rejoin me.

  Danger the thundering chords that bind you.

  Mouth meeting a mouth, in the cold, outside. In a public place, a street corner perhaps.

  And desperate because there is no time. You have an appointment, he has a train to catch.

  Drenched in the ink from the letters, soaked in it, spattered across chest and neck, pooling in the hollow of the clavicle.

  Disappearance of words, each one a black bird written against the storm-gray sky.

  Cathedral of rain unspooling blue from the sky. Mark me with rain. Spill all the words.

  Pieced through or pierced.

  A letter written on the page in white ink, confessing everything, declaring everything.

  More likely a thousand letters, each written on top of the other on the skin of my chest and stomach, the small brush licking me, licking me.

  Rain rushing down the steps of rue des Eaux for the river. A bronze statue of John the Bapstist, rain and river mixing around his feet.

  Who am I. Who I once was or who I wanted to be.

  Every day I ask for signs every day I fail to see.

  Rubbed the inkstone with the wet brush. Light wash of ink. Crisp letters. Spell out the story of your last desire in every space. Choruses of light and languor.

  Soft feathery touch on my skin, ink brush or tongue, sand drizzled over. Ash.

  How do you linger, what do you hear. The low box in the resonant harp.

  Blue and gray and white reaching down in strings and rivulets, wet upon you.

  Wet upon you wonder, a picture drawn slick in lines.

  Shorn after the storm, streets wet with asters and deletions. Rain still ringing in your ears.

  Charmed by the sky’s seduction.

  His tongue in my mouth, wind on my body or water. Warm in the moment after the storm.

  Rain drying on the paving stones. Rain-soaked leaves in drifts along the streets.

  Haven’t you seen my palm where it’s written the twenty-seven stars, lines crossing each other.

  Even as he pulls away to run for his train, I fling the thought after him: I want you to press yourself against me, write this minute into my skin.

  From rue des Eaux to the Trocadéro Gardens I run as the sky begins again its overture.

  It is a failure. I am soaked. I slow down to walk.

  On the bridge, under his improvised awning, in the half-rain, among the umbrella hawkers and scattered sunbeams, a portrait painter sits, waiting.

  Will I sit? he asks me, the rain already intensifying its demand, streaking down my face, my neck, into my shirt, along my chest, my wet stomach, down below my waist.

  And if there is ash and rain mixed with ink how will you draw a face or body, quivering in time, a day drenched a person become another.

  Write the rain, I beg him. Write it on me with your mouth.

  KISS, KISS, KISS

  Camille T. Dungy

  1. GOLDEN AGE

  I was closer in age to the baby than to the me I am now. On an island. Summer. There were eight of us. We had nothing to do. I don’t remember sleeping. We had so much to do. We took turns reading The Hobbit to each other. What would it be like to live in some other, almost ours, world?

  We ate fresh fish and veggies, drank lots of beer. Some of us kissed. We only took care of each other. We only took care of ourselves.

  We swam through the days, argued just a little. Some others kissed.

  Nothing of the way we were resembled life now. Nothing about me has changed.

  One afternoon, I got up from my towel and started walking. Where are you going? asked a friend.

  Toward the horizon, I told her.

  That friend would come to my wedding. Would come to my baby shower. Should I tell the others you’ll be gone awhile? she asked.

  Yes, I told her. Tell the others I’ll be gone awhile.

  2. THE TICKET

  I’d thought this would be a reflective time, but parenting is a now-centered endeavor. I may have to think about tomorrow, but then again, I have to think about assuring tomorrow will happen right now. Yesterday is over. Yesterday things happened that impact us now. This part of my life is running in the present tense.

  I can hardly remember her birth, let alone the first time I kissed her.

  Her birth, the first time I had a chance to kiss her, these are stories I tell like my other stories, urgently, but fuzzy on the details. Like the story I tell about the convenience store worker. On his last day in that bleak store, he bought a lottery ticket and won—was it a thousand dollars? Let’s say he only won a hundred. He reinvested his winnings into—was it a hundred tickets? Twenty? That’s not the point, see. The point is that now he’s a millionaire.

  3. LAST KISS

  Mom called today. Just to hear my voice.

  She spent the morning ushering at a funeral. A thousand people: every seat in the sanctuary, chairs in the narthex, the fellowship hall. People lined up from seven in the morning.

  A seventeen-year-old—volleyball star, newspaper editor—riding home from youth group.

  Her organs, eyes, ligaments, and skin were rushed elsewhere in lifecopters.

  One mother—her daughter completed suicide three years before—told the other volunteers she came to acknowledge how they’d helped her. I know I never thanked you. Every time I went to write a card, she said, I couldn’t.

  My friend Sebastian was in an accident last week. His heart is bruised. What happens when your heart is bruised?

  Caterpillars live in the passionflower bush over my girl’s day care. When I kissed her goodbye this morning, five butterflies circled my head.

  LIGHT YEARS

  Rebecca Makkai

  Some of the many things I don’t remember from that winter, my senior year of college: the moment I realized how late I was, or whether I told anyone else, or why I didn’t consider buying a test or at least going to the infirmary. What I remember is finding the boy inside the entrance to the English building and, because we were alone, telling him. It was a day or two before Christmas break. We’d given each other sweaters, and he was wearing his.

  I remember that I took every opportunity to hop down steps, to flop stomach-first on couches. I was dizzy, nauseated, terrified.

  In retrospect, there were alternate explanations for my body’s shutdown. At five-foot-seven, I weighed 115 pounds. I’d had a fever, on and off, for eight weeks. I was in such bad shape that although I passed all my English classes and even my last-ditch-science-requirement astronomy course, there are huge swaths of senior year I can’t remember at all. I’ll re-watch movies I know I saw that winter, and nothing. Books I read for senior seminars: nothing.

  I recently learned from my daughter that when Cassiopeia was cast into the sky as a chain of stars, an angry Poseidon ensured she’d spend half the night standing on her head. I must have learned this in 1999, as well. I’d have appreciated the story.

  I do not particularly remember what the boy said, just that one of us was headed to class, that it was a brief exchange, comforting. I assume we recited the standard script. (“How late?” “I’m trying not to think about it.” “Everything’s going to be fine.”) What I do remember, sharply, is the sad, sweet, reassuring kiss that ended the conversation. It was not romantic or sexual or platonic. It was not a parting kiss or a questioning kiss or really like any kiss I’d particularly known to exist. It was a kiss on the lips, but it might as easily have been a kiss on the forehead.

  It was a time machine to a point in my life where kissing would not be an imitation of a movie scene or a simple demonstration of desire—a point where it would always be in some ways about the fraught past, the fraught future, and yet, in that same moment, a refuge from those things.

  There are first kisses, and then there are first kisses. This wasn’t the boy I’d spend my life with, but it was the first kiss of the rest of my life.

  I was not pregnant. By June, the boy and I had broken up and reconciled and then broken up
again for good. I had memorized, for my astronomy final, every constellation in the northern hemisphere. Names and shapes and myths I’d forget by July.

  When I look up now, I’m back to just Orion and the dippers. The other stories—virgins frozen in flight, venomous snakes, grieving mothers—are a blur.

  But isn’t it good to remember they’re there? To know my life was briefly enriched by their gorgeous, complicated names?

  KISSING JOE F

  Philip Metres

  Burly Joe F had a mouth that never stopped. I’d never played basketball against someone who talked so much. Throughout the game, he talked to himself, to his teammates, to his opponents. Most of all, he unleashed a nonstop flood of invective toward the referees.

  My college intramural team was a hodgepodge of athletes and gym rats, the Black Student Union president and vice president, alongside some of the whitest guys you’d ever meet: Sweet Lew and Cookah, Philson and Ferrera. Everybody could ball, and we were poised to upset Joe’s football-jock squad and head to the championship. We were leading by a few points, but Joe—an all-conference offensive lineman, the son of an African-American professional baseball player—tried to haul his team back by words alone.

  The ref whistled a foul. Joe rushed into another one-sided debate with the ref, his tank-like frame leaned over the cowed freshman. Joe’s index finger menaced the air between them.

  Not knowing what I was doing, tired of Joe’s verbal attack, I approached him, placed my lips on his salty-wet cheek, and kissed.

  Stunned silent, Joe turned to face me.

  In college, sometimes I felt like I was playing my own punk version of Gandhi, heading off violence with softness. It’s true, I was a peacenik. I organized a rally against the Gulf War, served at a soup kitchen, and helped to found the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. I wrote poems, which a buddy joked meant that I “cried a lot.”

  But something in me seethed. I lusted tongue-tied after girls, utterly and unrequitedly. I couldn’t write a good poem, and was envy-green of my creative writing classmates who did. I regarded the varsity jocks with a mixture of jealousy and judgment. So on the hoop court against them, my angst would turn me briefly into an olive-skinned Hulk, slashing toward the basket, hurtling and hurling myself against all my outer and inner limits. Aching to prove myself. To be a man.