by Brian Turner
Dear reader, I wish I could say I let the kiss do the talking, my sweet and salty subversion.
I didn’t.
“That’s for acting like a woman,” I said.
To cut this man down, I betrayed all women.
Joe chuckled, tongue-stuck. He wiped his sweat-sheened forehead, jogged back to play defense, and didn’t talk the rest of the game.
I’d forgotten about that episode until now, a lifetime later, as my wife and I watch my thirteen-year-old daughter lope down the basketball court. From the oceanic vaults of my memory, among all the other kisses of my life, this one floated up—like a corpse.
I’m ashamed I couldn’t let that kiss burn like a strange wet star on Joe’s cheek. I had to erase its mystery with macho misogyny, with locker room sexism.
If only I kept my lips pursed shut, perhaps my act of disruptive brother-love could have sunk down, deep down, all the way down—into the kisser and the kissed.
HALF FABLE
Terrance Hayes
The giant many fans know as “Mega Tall Paul” was approximately half a century old the first time his father kissed him. Giants are difficult to kiss unless one is also a giant. As you know, Tall Paul towered in a realm of his own. The current Guinness World Records lists him as a clean eleven feet tall. He is in fact eleven feet two and seven-eighths inches. After Tall Paul told the cashier who asked his height the other day he was eleven feet two and seven-eighths inches, she said with a frown, “Why you gotta add the seven-eighths, ain’t eleven feet two already tall enough?” Tall Paul wanted to kiss her because no one else in all his years had ever told him it was a vain thing to say. He was well known for his large self-regard, but told the cashier he was only trying to sound exact. He wanted to kiss her for her illuminated critique, and if he had, it would have required severe bending. Mostly Tall Paul hugged people to his waist, he did not bend. Most of the fans who lined up to greet him after his shows were children. Mostly all he did was stand around. He poked his hands through the holes cut in the top of the circus tent when he raised his arms—a show highlight. Occasionally he wanted to kiss one of the lovely indifferent mothers of the children who were his fans. Sometimes he wanted to be kissed by one strange woman after another. He missed his wife. He was a passionate man. His shirt pits always had a kind of sweat and sugar smell to them. Occasionally he wanted one of the grown-up women to breathe his scent. Mostly all he did was stand around. His wife was not especially impressed. His mother, brother, and father were definitely his biggest fans. Tall Paul was glad he’d get to spend a couple of days with them in Florida. He wanted them to see how well he was doing. His extra-long shoes and clothes were tailor-made, he had been on the cover of a few little-read magazines devoted to freak fans. He was a minor celebrity, but at eleven-foot-two-and-seven-eighths inches tall no one needed to know who he was to gawk at his height. Three different security agents pulled him aside to take selfies at the airport when he landed. Sometimes he searched for images of himself posted on Instagram. Usually the picture was of some stranger wildly grinning beside his crotch. A few times it was just a shot of his nostrils and the bottom of his chin. When Tall Paul hugged people to his waist, it was not unlike the way his father and brother, two average-sized black men, hugged people. His father and brother were military men. His father and brother were sports fans. His father and brother did not kiss one another upon greeting. Tall Paul had just about freaked out when a foreigner at one of his events decided, upon realizing he could not kiss Tall Paul on the cheek, to kiss the giant’s large narrow hand. Any kiss in the region of his waist, which was just about all kisses when they happened, made Tall Paul blush. One of the security guards, a fit Hispanic woman, taking a selfie with him at the airport, kissed his hand. He got a slight erection. He thought of the woman’s hair and mouth and breasts and ass along the entire cab ride to the home of his brother in Tampa. His brother, an average-sized man, jumped from military aircrafts for a living. The giant liked to think it was because it gave his brother a view of his life. The giant suspected his brother was lonely falling from those heights. His brother’s daughters met him at the door when he stooped, practically bowing as he entered the house. The daughters, giggling, seven and ten, hugged Tall Paul’s kneecaps. He pulled two coins made of pure three-hundred-year-old silver from his pocket and passed one to each of them. He nodded toward the mother of the girls, his brother’s wife, his sister-in-law. He wasn’t sure what she thought of him. Tall Paul went down to his knee and kissed his mother. She had been waiting to kiss him. He had flown several hours from a land of twelve-month snows into a land of twenty-four-hour humidity. She would never tell him if he smelled unpleasant. He kissed her on her jaw; she kissed him on the cheek. Then, as the giant’s father half hugged him, the giant accidentally, almost automatically, kissed his father on the cheek. It was a peck, really, distributed closer to his ear than his cheek, burning imperceptibly as they pulled apart. A blush of silence opened, for a moment, between them. Even if the giant had not been a giant, he would have known, as all average boys know, boys do not kiss men; men do not kiss. The summer Tall Paul was sixteen, for example, before his father left for Korea, his father told him he’d be the big man of the house and shook his hand. When his father returned a year later, he shook Tall Paul’s bigger, longer hand in the same way, perhaps a little firmer. Rarely has the giant kissed standing perfectly upright. When the time came to kiss his petite bride twenty years ago, he fell to a knee, lifted the veil, and leaned into the soft clearing between her ear and shoulder blade, kissed her neck. He did not kiss his father the day of the marriage despite the wide smile they shared. In Florida when the giant’s father embraced him, he could not ever recall a time they’d been that close. Without thinking he kissed the side of his father’s face. The kiss was so near his ear, the giant could have whispered something about sadness to him. They pretended it had not happened.
But that is not the story I intended to tell. I intended to tell you about the first time my father kissed me. He probably kissed me when I was a boy, but I’m fairly sure he hadn’t kissed me since I was seven or eight years old. I was taught as all boys are taught: boys should not be kissed; men do not kiss. The thing I feared most happened: I became a middle-aged cliché. Consumed by the ways my parents damaged me. Insecure, reckless, lonely, a strange voice echoing in a giant helmet. I’d taken a plane to my brother’s home in Tampa so the four of us could drive the two hundred or so miles to Miami to see the Dolphins, my father’s favorite NFL team, play the Giants, my brother’s favorite team. During the drive my mother asked why I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring. Whatever I told her, she accepted for the time being. Or she was thinking, I can’t believe you kissed your father. Everyone fell silent when it happened. My father didn’t quite look me in the face. My brother slapped his hands and said something about the football game. My father wore his Dolphins jersey, my brother his Giants cap. My mother and I were dressed like civilians at the game. It occurred to me the men wore face masks perhaps to avoid kissing. The Giants won by two touchdowns. My brother teased my father, poking him in the ribs before patting him on the back. Just as we began climbing the stadium stairs, a cussing ruckus broke out between two drunk white men several rows below. A tattooed muscular man swung almost gleefully in the direction of a smaller man who ducked and dodged swinging in retreat. After a few hot moments they quit as if realizing we bystanders would not intervene. My mother reprimanded the security guard who’d watched like the rest of us as the two men flailed failing to land a single blow. We had two separate rooms at a hotel across from the airport. I’d have to catch a plane out of Miami early the next morning. My mother brought over two small cups of some kind of peach-flavored schnapps, glancing once more at my bare ring finger before exiting. My brother and I stayed up late talking. The next morning, before heading to the airport—I meant to wait until the last minute—my brother and I went to our parents’ hotel room. I’d had a dream the night before. The four of us
were seated in the stadium. From behind me I could hear someone saying, “Don’t you come nowhere near my grave! Don’t you come nowhere near my grave.” That’s pretty much all that happened. The men we’d seen fighting at the end of game did not appear in the dream. The stands sloped into oblivion. They were full of stadium trash, but they were empty. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I almost mentioned it when my mother shook her head mumbling something about premonition the next morning. They had slept separately in the room’s double beds. For some reason my mother had made her bed. Flowers were printed on her new pajamas. Her hair was immaculate. I have never seen her tend to her hair, but I have never seen a hair out of place. When I kissed her on the top of her forehead, she smiled just as her granddaughters had when I kissed them the day before. My father sat on the bed with tears on his face. I had seen him weep at his mother’s funeral; I had heard him crying on the other side of a door that year he and my mother came close to divorce; but I had never seen him sob the way he did that morning when I told him my marriage was ending. I can’t describe it, the gentleness. It shocked us: my brother, mother, and me. No one said anything. Then he rose and embraced me for what felt like two or three minutes. My face was against his shoulder. Before letting go, he kissed me, quickly, softly.
THE EVOLUTION OF A KISS
Nickole Brown
Let it begin. Not at the beginning, but with ants, maybe, unacknowledged makers of this world they are, opening capillaries in the soil so it might breathe. Let it begin with ants, a highway of them in and out of their busy kingdom, the tickle of their hinged antennae in greeting, a chemical exchange, then a kind of flirtation—the beckoning of mandibles, a barely audible tap-tap-tap not unlike pebbles thrown up at the midnight window of a beautiful girl. We want to say everything begins with us, that creatures feel the way we do, so scientists will tell us not to be fooled into thinking this is a kiss. But watch as one nestmate joins another at its mouth—from one to the other flows sustenance, a body-warmed surplus of sweetness.
Then let’s skip ahead, a step up, past the lizards, up into the air, to birds. The crop milk of pigeons and flamingos, how their throats swell for their young, their tongues dripping a necessary curd into waiting, hungry mouths. Or all those nest hatchlings with beaks brightly marked on the inside that, opened wide, make for a mother’s beak a bright directive, a diamond-shaped landing pad. Then there is something closer to what we know of a kiss—courtship feeding, all those cardinals and kingfishers passing treats between them as maybe you did at the back of the school bus, an exchange of chewed gum in lieu of a for-real smooch. We cannot call these avian offerings a kiss, not exactly, but still, Darwin knew something we hesitate to admit. When he wrote, “They fell in love with one another,” it was no remark about a Victorian courtship—he was talking about a pair of ducks.
Obscenely rushed, but you know what’s next: the mammal tongue, warm with its own blood, decked with a surface to taste and scour the one place another animal cannot reach on its own body—its head and face. There is logic here, how each furred being can only groom itself with the lay of its own hair, but groomed by another, the cleanse is deeper, dislodging what needs to be removed, a taste that digs against the grain. Here, too, is the fox lapping the face of his mate, the nipping of hyenas and nuzzling of rats, the puckering chimps, the male elephant in musth—his face inviting taste, literally seeping with desire.
So let us not make a kiss into an abstraction, a metaphor planted on your own palm and blown into the air. Because everything human has its animal beginnings. The kiss—born of an empire of tongue and spit, of hunger and itch—is a break in the dam separating two beings that agree, Yes, please touch me there. An insane gesture, at least on paper, to open our most necessary and vulnerable aperture and surrender it to another, to give over that place with which we eat and speak and breathe.
For me, this long song leads to East Eleventh Street, New York. Nine years ago now, maybe ten. Leaning in her doorway, the taste of her mouth stained with the aftertaste of pomegranate tea. It was the first time I was close enough to see how shallow the divot at the base of her neck, to smell something of the city’s traffic in her hair. I didn’t know I’d found my wife yet and would not know for years what I had found, but my mouth knew. My tongue knew. And the creatures before me, they knew, too. The whole aching chorus of them, all the way back to single-celled beasts who swallowed each other whole not to eat but to make what was two into one. That first night, that evening in December, our first kiss was already wired deep within. I am no scientist, but still, I try to count the ages that made that risk; I count and bless the thirty-four muscles of my human face that made that kiss.
KISSING MELISSA
Benjamin Busch
Before I ever kissed anyone, I was kissing Melissa. Fifth grade, and it was sorcery, a figment of fire, a girl in my head. It happened without language, a wave closing in, wild and necessary like mating. There isn’t a cure for this new awareness when you’re young and drunk with it. Gravity always makes you fall. It wore me down, those long days passing in the halls, glimpsing her on bleachers, and sitting close in class. I would gaze and get caught, but she didn’t know how passionately we were already involved . . . and I didn’t know how to tell her. I wanted to sleep so I could kiss her again.
Dances in the school cafeteria were the only times to see her in a transcendental state. Lights low for slow songs gave us all brief courage, like animals in evenings when the sky is small with darkness, when the world is a place you can hide in, and I would pace the edges, overcome, afraid of the chance to hold her for a few nervous moments. Just asking for a dance burned all my bravery. We stood straight and separate, my arms stiff and hands hot as we circled, turning like a universe, a sun between us. She smiled and I couldn’t say what I’d rehearsed. All the songs spoke for me. All the songs replied. All the songs were about her.
And so I kissed her thousands of times while we slept, kept apart by hills and fields, rivers and nights. It was like a premonition, the touch of our lips, an urge I can’t articulate, even now, our heads tilted and eyes closed, a waking dream, an exchange of vows. These were fantasies—so I was good at kissing, the two of us standing, fit together like a braid. It felt urgent and hallucinogenic, our bodies blending. She bewildered me with a sense of certainty, a red flush of longing. She gave me a fever that lasted a decade.
I tried to look away. Entire relationships swelled and fell. Sweet kisses happened with others while this perfect one lay coiled within me. I wondered how she would taste. I wanted to change my face, the way I walked. I wanted to be other boys, better boys, grow differently, defy ancestry and biology. I started acting on stage, but I couldn’t be anyone else enough. I wanted to press my mouth to hers, feel her voice on my tongue, pull the breath from her lungs, the heat and wet of her love drawn in like steam, one hand in her dark hair, the other on the small of her back.
This may be your story, too. We drowned, you and I, electric with yearning and its desperate indignities. High school arced until it ended, all of us suddenly blown into the rest of our lives, these loves moored where we dreamt them. We can’t summon that first flame with the same feral immediacy, that chemical burn in our blood, but those days are there, stored somewhere like damp gunpowder. I’ve never forgotten her. It was a beautiful romance and lit my way to immensities. Melissa comes back to me sometimes, a flicker, thirty years later, but she’s still a girl, her face blurred by layers of memory, someone else now, someone else then. I finally know what I’d say if I were still a boy. It took never kissing her to find the words.
KISS, KISS
Ira Sukrungruang
I
My six-month-old son knows the sound, the electric trilling that comes from the tablet I hold in front of him. When he hears it, he giggles, smiles, and waits. What will emerge, he knows, is an old woman eight thousand miles away, in a country where purple lotuses bloom in ditches, a country currently without a government. To my son, this woma
n is magic. She appears suddenly from a dark screen, and what he sees is not her face but the top of her forehead and the dome of her black hair. He grabs for the woman, believing she is there in his Florida home. The woman says hello in two languages—Thai and English. She says his Thai name, Po, over and over again. This old woman does not know that we can hear her perfectly; she does not need to shout. This doesn’t matter to my son. The old woman’s forehead is familiar. Her voice. He loves the sound of his name spoken in a foreign tongue.
II
The hours before he arrived, the sky was cloudless, the day bright. But a storm gathered quickly and thrashed against the hospital windows. The lights outside lit the rain speckles on the glass into tiny globes of orange. This is what I remember from the outside world, those globes of orange light. Inside the room, the midwife could not find my son’s heartbeat. My wife knotted her hands in the sheets and howled. I put my head against hers, whispering clichéd encouragement. You can do this. You’re doing great. But I wasn’t sure if she could do this. I wasn’t sure whether she was doing great. The clipped voices of the midwife and nurses seemed to suggest otherwise.
The midwife said it was time. Said, This boy wants out. “I can’t hear the heartbeat,” she said.
“You need to push.”
And my wife did. Through tears. Through screams.
“I got him,” the midwife said. “He’s arrived.”
