The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  FRUIT

  Cameron Dezen Hammon

  Hail Mary, full of grace,

  We shouldn’t have and we almost didn’t. We were one floor below my sleeping lover, and the sleeping classmates we both loved. Graduation day was coming. Who was sleeping? We weren’t. And if they were, I suppose I’ll never know.

  the Lord is with thee;

  I like to think they were. I like to think we were alone in that dusty apartment, three a.m. In that sad, crumbling building, like two people on the moon are alone. Blood rushed in our ears. It canceled out all nightsound. No cicadas sang in the wiry trees. No wind swell. No bobcat or coyote. If there was anything outside the tight link of us we didn’t care.

  blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

  We stood apart first, then closer, then finally nose to nose, so close we could smell the heat of our bodies. We can still smell it. We offered the broken fruit of our mouths and then knelt like penitents. What is it but worship when we yield our mouths like this?

  Holy Mary, Mother of God,

  We shouldn’t have and we almost didn’t. We kept stoking that weak pulse long after our bodies were in different cities, long after any chance to complete the circuit we’d built was lost. Yet we still think about it. We still write about it. We fill blank page after blank page.

  pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  We saw ourselves from the distance of the old people we will someday be. We were young and beautiful then. We were an unexpected, brief passion. We loved the sadness because it made us work. We marveled at the sight—the dropped crutches, the leprosy, cured. We reached for the hem of the garment—a frayed concert T-shirt, a pair of dirty cutoffs. Our mouths hung open at the miracle—the power of one illicit kiss in the middle of the night.

  Amen.

  FIRE THE ANGEL

  Martín Espada

  My brother called on a Friday night: If you want to see him, come now. I bought a plane ticket from Boston to San Francisco. On Saturday, there was a blizzard. The flight was canceled. Frank Espada died on Sunday, February 16, 2014.

  I arrived the next day, drove my mother to the mortuary, and wrote a check for my father’s cremation. The white box of ashes sits on a chair in my study. Atop the box there is a snapshot of my father at age seventeen, in his baseball uniform, kicking high in the air and reaching back with his right hand, almost to the ground, in the action of whipping a baseball home.

  I would talk to the box of ashes. I missed the hour of his death, my last chance to say something meaningful in his ear, to lean over and kiss his forehead.

  There were no more kisses once I reached junior high. Years later, I handed him a poem about the time he had been jailed for a sit-in protesting racial discrimination and I, being seven in 1964, concluded that he must be dead. He read it and lurched into in my arms, sobbing. I should’ve kissed him.

  Jack Agüeros was my father’s compañero and co-conspirator in the Puerto Rican community. Both made images. Many faces lived in my father’s camera: a street preacher, a weathered tobacco-picker, a woman grieving the loss of two sons to gang warfare. Jack’s sonnets praised a one-legged bicycle messenger, a loquacious character on the unemployment line, the dancers who died in a nightclub fire.

  He was the first poet I ever met. Over the years, Jack became my second father. Somewhere, there is a handwritten contract on a paper napkin that says so. I would call whenever I came to New York, and hear: Agüeros advises declarative sentences—after the beep. Two generations of Espadas slept on his couch. I would open my eyes to a stack of poems on the table.

  We gave readings together. Jack would show up early to defy the stereotype of PR Time. He wore a suit, so I wore a suit. He answered a question about why he sometimes wrote in Spanish by saying: To bust chops! He was always the quickest guy in the room.

  I did not invite Jack to speak at my father’s memorial. The quickest guy in the room was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. His daughter Natalia called: If you want to see him, come now.

  I leaned over the rails of Jack’s bed to read a poem in his ear, his own “Psalm for Distribution.” I smoothed back his hair and kissed his forehead. The hospice nurse said: Él te conoce. He knows you.

  Jack Agüeros died on May 4, 2014. Two weeks later, Natalia walked to the podium at my father’s memorial. She read the words I said to Jack before I kissed him:

  Lord,

  on 8th Street

  between 6th Avenue and Broadway

  there are enough shoe stores

  with enough shoes

  to make me wonder

  why there are shoeless people

  on the earth.

  Lord,

  You have to fire the Angel

  in charge of distribution.

  LEANING IN

  Dinty W. Moore

  I was lucky to see my father once or twice a week, though we lived under the same roof for the first ten years of my life. He had a drinking problem, of the stumble-about, fall-down variety, yet—amazing to me now—he somehow managed to hold down a steady job throughout it all.

  What this meant practically was that before I rose for school, my father would be up and out of the house, heading to Dailey’s Chevrolet, where he stood in a pit and worked on the undersides of cars. His day ended around four-thirty p.m., but instead of heading home like his fellow mechanics, he would stop at the Cascade Club, drink a bit, play cards. He might stay at the club all evening, or he might drop by Mentley’s, or Barilla’s, or some other neighborhood bar, for a nightcap.

  But just as he always somehow made it to work, Dad was reliable about coming home—staggering in around ten p.m., when I was either fast asleep or just barely awake, listening to the slam of the back door, his unsteady feet on the steps, my mother’s voice telling him to stop, that she was sleeping. “No, Bud,” she would say. “Not tonight.”

  To put it plainly, I barely knew my dad, though he was sweet and funny those rare times we did interact, on a Sunday morning before he snuck off for his euchre game, maybe, or on a holiday like Christmas or Easter when the extended family would gather at his sister Grace’s house. I saw him more at her dining room table than I did at our own.

  Around the time I turned ten, my mother left my father, took us away to an apartment, and eventually Dad somehow sobered up. I was too young at the time to understand how difficult that must have been for him, but suddenly I was with my father for hours at a time, having dinner in the room he rented in a sad boardinghouse, then eventually spending entire weekends in the mobile home he purchased, and, in the summer, paddling around the Presque Isle Bay in his canoe.

  In my memory, my father never once tucked me in, never once kissed me good night during my childhood. In this new phase, it took a while until we even hugged. He was my father, but a stranger, and neither of us knew exactly how to proceed.

  And then one day—I was sixteen, maybe—as we said goodbye near his front doorway, I stretched up on my toes and kissed him, on his unshaven face, on the stubble of his cheek. I can feel it still, the sharpness of the whiskers, the surprisingly soft skin underneath. I can feel, also, him not pulling back, but leaning in.

  He didn’t live many years longer. I’m sure I kissed him a few more times.

  But that first kiss.

  I miss him, my dad.

  So damn much.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY KISS

  Tina Chang

  I had never created man before so I invented my son first as a dream body. In order to create the dream body I must first believe in the force of opposites, a terrible tension of what has existed and the struggle yet to come. And it is true, that I had a notion of him for many years; for generations my imagination traveled in search of him.

  It seems unlikely that a kiss would have roots in the Haitian Revolution, but it does. Over a century ago, an uprising of hundreds of thousands of slaves freed themselves from chain and rope, from whip and guillotine, f
rom bondage through the struggle of blood. They fought for thirteen years in a revolution to stand on the shores of their own land, newly named Haiti, as free people, and they kissed the ground however damp with the blood of their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sons. Slaves, newly liberated whispered my son’s name, his dream body envisioned there, beneath the rust of shackles, beside shards of slave owners’ homes, rising with smoke from burned plantations. Past the pinnacle of scoured light, past the canopy of trees dripping with the uprising of future leaves, my son begins his journey to me.

  Once there was a chain of kisses as my mother said goodbye to her brothers and sisters lined in a row, as she left Taiwan for America, a shock of leis around her neck as she waved to a country of ghosts. My mother’s history was equally complex. She left China in 1949, when Communists led by Chairman Mao took over mainland China. My mother crowded into a boat that would take her to the coast of Taiwan known as the beautiful island, which she would one day yearn to leave.

  By foot, by boat, by train, by bus, by plane. It seems impossible these two histories intertwine so that one day I may find a dream body housed inside mine. All along, I wring my hands and worry, will I know how to mother him? What language will I speak? What will my mother utter once she discovers the detour of my ancestry? Will she abandon me, turn the portraits of my ancestors toward the wall, backs directed away from my longing?

  When I woke, the doctor’s voice was muffled and thick. My mind moved in syncopated pulses and I pushed until all energy drained and my body cracked open. Liquid gold rushed away. Finally and now. He arrived, a purpled creature, violet and squirming, face crushed into an emperor’s expression.

  Born from the urgency of immigrants, how futile all of my years of worrying. I should have known my boy would row his small boat to me, regardless of the sky above that shook down its lightning, and even if the ground was bruised and famished of fruit and even freedom, he would continue on as if a force were lulling him to bedrock. Right here between his eyebrows, there is swell of light, a country where I belong, no longer a stranger to my own skin. My mouth to his temple, I hear a siren wail from afar and it reminds me the city is a living creature, panting. Tanks roll through the tale squeaking, turning their heavy wheels. I walk inward, over the leaves, and they illuminate. I know there is a will beyond me. I am ready now to hold the weight of my son. When I kiss him, history’s weapons fall from my pockets, shields cast beneath attalea trees. I will now end my days of resistance, my lips searching the entirety of his dream face made mortal, my lost shadows now migrating in unison.

  THE HEAVY LOAD

  Adam Dalva

  My OCD (and we’re talking diagnosis, not topic-sentence shorthand for fussy) tends to manifest harmlessly. I like to count bottles above bars until the one on the top-right matches my age; at thirty-one, this is proving quite difficult. I take an occasional Klonopin to sleep if I can’t stop picturing, say, the lesser Greek gods frolicking in vivid 3-D above my bed for hours. Lately, I fear that I’m going to throw a glass of water in someone’s face, so I spend restaurant meals clutching tablecloths and suffering through awkward ideations that feel more real than reality. These things pass. But a pernicious, decade-long symptom is my desire—no, my need—to be kissed on New Year’s Eve at midnight.

  Since my first kiss, age eighteen, I have never not kissed someone at that terminal moment of New Year’s Eve, as everyone shouts and gesticulates. My first year after college, I spent the holiday in an abysmal pirate-themed bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Despite the entreaties of the paid “galley wenches,” I was reading a book, miserable, when a woman approached me. Let’s call her Amanda, since her name was Amanda. “I want to eat your brain,” Amanda said, tapping my Salinger, and as 2009 hit, we were smooching. The next year, I went back to the same horrible bar with the same horrible friends, and again, I was approached, and I should clarify here that though I really am quite nice, I’m not the sort who’s approached for a spontaneous kiss very often.

  By November of 2010, I’d started to wonder if it was going to happen again. This strain of narrative curiosity is the root of my OCD. Wonder becomes hope becomes the need to enact, and so with fifteen minutes to go on David Zee’s West Village roof above an anodyne sex shop, I was considering a gallant offer from my friend Matt, who is gay, who is a man.

  I did not want to kiss Matt—not only am I not attracted to men, but he was also my best friend’s ex-boyfriend, and my best friend is the type who will cut you out for less. Still: the compulsion. Matt and I made out for a bit. God, it was horrible—mechanical and aloof and scratchy and the way his tongue ran between the groove in my front teeth was sort of hypothetically sexy until I confronted the reality that it was Matt, that my best friend had been greatly moved by this sensation, that several people on the roof were thoroughly confused, that my disgust said something damning about my flatlining Kinsey scale. “That’s so cool,” various women have since exclaimed when they ask if I’ve been physical with a man, and I don’t know how to tell them that, even beyond their disappointing alignment of coolness with sexual preference, there was nothing cool about it.

  The next year, I had just started dating someone new, and it became clear that she was going to be late to the New Year’s party. There had been no discussion of monogamy and I felt as I always do when OCD begins to set in—it’s a crawling need, a buzz that must be stopped. Teeth clench; toes wiggle. I was approached around eleven p.m., which felt like inevitability. Never mind that the approacher had a strange affect. Her dress was made of sparkles; her wig was voluminous; she was a woman. I agreed to our midnight rendezvous.

  The party was at one of those Williamsburg apartment complexes where no one knows the owner, though one presumes he’s in the most obnoxious quadrant of the party, and there were multiple balconies. I went to the top one, intentionally separate from my friends. It’s quite warm out in memory, but perhaps it just wasn’t notably cold. I stood there alone. Honestly, I was sort of hoping that my appointment wouldn’t find me. Maybe things could be different in 2012. But she arrived. There were going to be fireworks that year, and as everyone began counting down, I turned and looked toward the East River, metallic and distant and fine. Hundreds of thousands of people before me, most counting, many about to kiss. Things felt tenuous, and I saw that she was looking up at me, still sparkly, lips pursed, leaning in as three and two were shouted by all, as our four eyelashes fluttered.

  It’s nearing, as we approach T-0, the time for me to describe the kiss. And this would usually present a problem: I’ve never been good at that. I once described lips in my novel as warm and soft, and Lorrie Moore, in the midst of her only workshop in NYU, Lorrie Moore who is a hero of mine, said, “Lips are never warm and soft, Adam.” Barely concealed disdain flashed across her face. “They are only ever chapped and spicy.” It was a perfect Lorrie Moore two-set. I laughed and nodded and felt like vomiting, but I’ve never figured out my own chapped and spicy. All my kisses have been warm and soft, with the exception of Matt, which was like kissing two re-animating worms stuck to hot concrete.

  Regardless, it was time to kiss this woman I didn’t want to kiss. At first it was warm, and soft, and wet. Fireworks went off. People were cheering. I felt very, very observed. And then an object passed from her mouth into mine. A tooth, small and hard. No, two teeth. I unlocked and spat the objects out onto the thronged balcony below, then turned back to see her smiling at me. I looked down at her hand. Reader, she was holding a raisin box. The little Sun-Maid one, red, with the blushing lady presenting the grapes and the hot sun pounding down. She had passed two rehydrated raisins from her mouth into mine. The woman nodded at me, then vanished forever.

  Me? I’m a tinkerer of my own past. But this is the only event in my life that remains completely, frustratingly opaque. It must have been intentional—it was a New Year’s kiss, the one kiss a year that’s totally planned, when we count down, when there are cues. And she had asked to kiss me. We’ve all su
ccessfully kissed with chewing gum in our mouths without said gum crossing the Rubicon; she must have planned it. But why? No one saw it happen, barely anyone believes me. Maybe it was a fetish—maybe it was her own compulsion.