by Brian Turner
Finally, the woman I ended up dating arrived, and we kissed on the subway platform on the way home. She never found out about the incident. I’ve told very few people about it since. I should make clear that this isn’t a story about getting better. They rarely are for me. Every year since, I’ve kissed someone at midnight. I have broken up with two different women at New Years’ parties, one at two a.m., the other at four, but each year, I’ve managed to stop the buzz. And every time I do now, there is the remembered ghost of raisins, sweet and just a bit wet (which, now that I write it, is a half-decent description of a kiss).
MAUDE
Kimiko Hahn
What would her lips feel like—? A tulip petal? A porcelain bowl?
The last time I saw her, she was waving goodbye as Ted and I drove off with the baby, already snoozing in the backseat. I saw her turn away to climb the three dozen steps back to the shambly house. Not her fault, the shambles. Not the fault of mice or the snow that settled into a crust on the flat roof.
Days later, Father took her to the Kabuki. On the drive home, a car of teenagers broadsided them. Father cursed. Mother lay slumped on the passenger side. He didn’t realize she was dead.
A metal bowl? Doily? Birch bark? Page torn from an old book?
Ted and I decided to see her at the funeral home. To “view her” in the pine coffin. Before she was delivered to the crematorium. The undertaker commented on how “Orientals don’t show their age.” Sixty-eight, only a few years older than I am today. I looked. But I didn’t clip a wisp of hair as keepsake. I didn’t touch her clothes or her hand. It was enough to see what I would come to describe as the body that was Mother’s.
Ice? I was told not to put lips or tongue on ice because my skin would stick fast.
Was I afraid to kiss her on the lips or did that sense just occur to me? Afraid to kiss the lips that were my mother’s? Pumice? Bar of soap? Like both connects and keeps at arm’s length.
(Had she wanted to go?)
JUDAS KISS
Tom Sleigh
When I asked a friend what I should write about, she said, “There’s always a betrayal in a kiss.” I won’t belabor the point, since I’m sure you can work it out on your own—but I immediately thought of Judas kissing Jesus in order to show the Jewish council’s soldiers whom they should arrest. There’s a painting by Giotto in which Judas wraps his long, flowing silver robe around Jesus, engulfing him as he moves in for the kill, much the way Bela Lugosi in his long cape moves in on his victims in the old Dracula movies. And like Dracula, there’s a look of almost helpless resignation and, even worse, self-recognition in Judas’s eyes that lets you know that he knows he’s a monster.
Anyone over the age of fifty knows that look; by that time of life, who hasn’t betrayed or been betrayed by a lover, parent, or a friend? The kiss I gave to my dying father was a kiss of betrayal for not going down to the grave with him. And when I was shooting dope at sixteen, and he searched my pockets where I’d carelessly left my fix, and confronted me about the baggie of heroin, I felt violated by him for going through my pockets without asking. I try to snatch the baggie out of his hand, we scuffle, he somehow manages to flush it down the toilet. This is hard drugs! he shouts. You shouldn’t steal stuff from my pockets! I shout back. And then my father tries to kiss me: but I shrink back from him even as our eyes lock—and then he touches me gently on the shoulder as if his touch could fix what is unfixable.
But this moment of private pathos isn’t my only focus here. There’s a short story by Borges in which he speculates that God actually incarnated himself in Judas, not Jesus. He says that Judas made the ultimate sacrifice by ensuring his own damnation and eternal revilement. When Judas takes the thirty pieces of silver, when he kisses Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane just after Jesus, in an agony of fear about being nailed to the cross, has prayed to his Father to allow the cup to pass, when the soldiers seize Jesus and take him before Caiaphas the high priest, when Judas in despair then hangs himself—what greater sacrifice could there be? Traitor, suicide, sell-out. But Judas knew his fate was foretold from the world’s beginning. And in the bitterness of that fate, not only did he know that the magnitude of his sacrifice would go misunderstood, he knew it would never be recognized.
And he did this for us, so that none of us would ever have to feel alone in such depths of degradation and depravity.
Unlike Judas, whose hateful act becomes in our sinful eyes an act of love, in a Benetton ad campaign five years ago, world leaders who are archenemies are Photoshopped to look as if they are kissing each other on the mouth: the UNHATE ad campaign. Obama kisses Hu Jintao of China, Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine kisses Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Kim Jong-il of North Korea kisses Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, and so on. What all these leaders have in common as they smooch is that their eyes are closed: these seem like erotic kisses, not formal ones. Only Jesus and Judas have their eyes wide open, as if they knew their kiss would be a source of eternal bitterness to the other. These bromances are comic and creepy and wonderfully upsetting of hetero respectability—maybe an orgy at the UN would be in order?
And then there’s Donald Trump—kissing various Ms. Universes, kissing Melania, kissing babies and children, including a little African-American girl who turns her head away, air-kissing Mike Pence who wears an embarassed smile and also turns away; and in an image lampooning them both, Trump and Ted Cruz puckering up on a billboard promoting an end to homophobia.
But kissing is far from universal: in fact, less than half of the world’s cultures kiss for romantic purposes, and almost no animals. I think of my father’s helpless attempt to kiss his wayward child, and of Trump and Jesus and Judas and the world leaders, and rather than words comes the image of a sea lion and its trainer. The trainer holds a fish in one hand and when the sea lion pecks his cheek, he throws a fish to the sea lion, who gulps it down and claps its flippers. This kiss is also a Judas kiss, an act of intraspecies betrayal: the man wants the sea lion to act like a man, but all it can do is act like a sea lion trained to act like a man. And for the sea lion’s part, the kiss means nothing but a fish. Now, supported by the man who wraps one arm around it, the sea lion galumphs up on its hind flippers. Locked in a clumsy embrace, the sea lion gapes its mouth open so wide that it almost swallows the whole head of the man.
THE SMUGGLER
Ada Limón
It’s been a whole month since I’ve seen you, so I’ve taken to talking to you while I do simple things around the house. It’s a drowsy sort of madness. To lighten the mood (the one I get in, you know, all ink and plummet), I bought the brightest yellow tulips I could find and placed them on our huge vintage coffee table that anchors our bodies when we’re home. Distance is a strange dissection of the mind. I live in two places. Where I am and where you are. This morning, I woke up and thought I was in that shitty cabin in Ocala with you, but instead I was in a well-lit home in Kentucky, the dog’s rough paw over my mouth, as if blocking me from speaking. I dreamt of tsunamis and tidal waves coming to wash everything clean.
On the morning walk today, I saw a hospice nurse leaving our neighbor’s house, the brick one across the street, two doors down. She must be visiting the woman whose dog you saved in that dark October night when the dog, half blind, wandered into traffic. I wonder if that ancient dog’s all right. She had one foot on the train tracks. Our neighbor called the dog Little Guy, but she was a girl. She bit you with what was left of her teeth and you didn’t even care, praised her for trying, even, and gathered her surrendered body in your arms and carried her home. Anyway, I knew the visitor was a hospice nurse because of what she carried, and how she kept her head down, like a wise dog knowing exactly where the weaving trail leads.
Our dog is snoring right now as I write this. Spoiled and content. Swaddled in gray blankets like the hazy sun swirled in fog. Sometimes I think everything we do is formed by death. You wrote me right after C died, though you and I had already made out hard once at a holiday party
, mouths thirsty for each other, all the colored lights blurring in the periphery and the dirty smog of winter smoke in the air. After C’s memorial, after the hospice nurse had left, and T pulled all the wine away from the guests, T and I slept in the white guest room upstairs. I checked my email in the morning. There were your words, so bare on the gray screen, and all in lowercase like you were bowing to the grief I was thrown into. When T woke up, her hair wild around her shoulders, she said she had the most vivid dream that I was walking in the Northwest woods and a blue plaid bird landed on my shoulder. Sometimes we still call you that plaid bird.
And now, nearly seven years later, your ex has died, the gorgeous girl right before it was my turn to love you, and there’s more grief we bow and bend toward. I was in Texas when you told me. I sobbed in the giant bathtub, for you and for her, and for her and then for you again, then again for me, selfish as I am, always for me. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but what I remember most was the second kiss. The one after the death was nearly three months behind me and we sat in the backyard of that Italian place off Metropolitan and Bushwick. The place was called Il Passatore, which later I found out meant “The Smuggler” in Italian. You leaned in to kiss me outside on the spring sidewalk among Brooklyn’s many broken tulips, petals all tipsy from traffic, and I felt like I could breathe again. Like it was not a kiss, but a resuscitation. I was smuggled back into the world again, under your arm like that foggy-eyed dog you saved from the oncoming cars.
I can hear the train going by now. I love the sound it makes, singular and straightforward, not like life at all. The sun’s coming out stronger and I’ll see you again in three days. And in two months we’ll be married on the mountaintop. I think of all the footprints we’ll carry with us in our heads, the dead moving through us like air, how each touch seems to be a reminder of what we cannot touch again. All this to say, thank you, I love what your mouth does to me: how it reminds me where I am and what I’m doing, how in kissing you I’m kissing all those who kissed you and you’re kissing all those who kissed me, this breath we pass to each other is proof that we’re still living.
A KISS FOR THE DYING
Suzanne Roberts
1.
Mother has been told that she is dying. Maybe three months, the internist says with a shrug. He listens to her heart, the lungs filled with tumors. Then he says, “What you have is very bad.”
Mother pulls a face at him. I try not to laugh.
When the pulmonologist walks into the room, Mother asks, “Have you heard? I’m a goner.”
He doesn’t answer her, and he takes her pulse. “It’s very fast,” he says, and then tells her that there’s a nerve on her neck, that if he presses on it, the heart will slow down.
It works, and Mother says, “You should go to Vegas,” meaning that he might take his magic trick on the road. But he only hears “vagus,” and he says, “Very good! That is your vagus nerve.”
We all laugh, except the doctor, who is very serious.
2.
For the past few months, Mother had lost her sense of humor, and when I asked her why, she said, “Because nothing is funny anymore.” She hadn’t been feeling well, thought it was her heart, wondered why she wasn’t getting any better. But once she was diagnosed with extensive small cell lung cancer, the most aggressive form of lung cancer, everything is funny again, even things that aren’t. Like the man in the hospital room next door, wailing to anyone who passes his room, “Nurse, help me. Nurse? Doctor? Help me.”
Mother is getting a blood transfusion, and by the second bag of blood, Mother starts imitating him: Nurse! Help me! The only thing that saves this from being mean is that he is constipated, and she’s dying. So it only seems fair. Even our nurse, who has tired of this man’s constant moaning, laughs with us.
When I leave her room, I walk to the side of her hospital bed, and I bend down under the fluorescent lights to kiss her. The skin on her forehead is sometimes dry and papery beneath my lips, sometimes it is cold and damp. I kiss her, and I say the same thing, every time. I say, “Don’t die, okay?”
And she says, “No, I won’t.” And we laugh.
3.
I ask Mother if she remembers her first kiss with my father. She laughs and says, “Of course I do.”
“Tell me.”
“Well,” she says. “It was after our first date. We went to the beach, and when he dropped me off, he kissed me.”
“Did he ask you first?”
“No, but he knew.”
“How?”
“A woman has a way of showing it. You should know,” she says. “But more than that first kiss. I knew I wanted to marry him the minute I met him. It’s strange to me now. But I just knew.”
4.
Mother asks me if I remember my first kiss.
I tell her the oleander rustled in the hot Santa Ana winds, and the asphalt melted beneath my Keds. Then his tongue entered my mouth like a surprise. I could not have pictured that development when I kissed my pillow, practicing for the moment. I didn’t know that slipping a tongue into another’s mouth was a thing. I had heard of French kissing and thought it meant tilting your head and kissing for a long time. Or a kind of kissing invented in France—something foreign and mysterious. I wasn’t sure, but I wouldn’t have guessed it involved the tongue.
I didn’t know that, within a few days, this boy would tell me it was over. Or that this first kiss, and the kisses that followed, would do nothing to save me from the horrors of junior high school. And that after this first kiss, everything else would come far too quickly.
I knew only that the kiss tasted like Jolly Rancher sour apple candy and that everything else disappeared—my eyes shut tight to the afternoon sun of my own becoming.
5.
I ask Mother to tell me about the first time she kissed me.
“It wasn’t right away. They took you away and cleaned you. I couldn’t wait for the nurses to bring you back, and when they did, I kissed you.”
“Where?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“On the forehead. And your father did, too. And you had this blue vein that sort of popped out there. Your father was so worried about it. But I knew it would be fine, and it was.”
There are pictures around her house of Mother and me when I am little, and in some, we are kissing. There are no such pictures of me and my father. I do not remember ever kissing him, and I wasn’t there when he died, so I never kissed him goodbye.
Sometimes he comes back to me in dreams, but by the time I reach him, he’s already gone.
On my way out of Mother’s hospital room, I rub foamy hand sanitizer into my hands, a ritual that has come to feel something like prayer. And next door, the howling, and the smell of blood and urine, disinfectant and shit. I walk the shiny halls and then come back to her room and leave again, and every time I go, I say it: I kiss her goodbye on the forehead, and I say, Don’t die, and she doesn’t.
It’s only funny if she stays alive.
MAN WITHOUT FEAR
Sholeh Wolpé
When I was on the island of San Simón, I fell in love with a stone man.
Besides him, there were nine of us: seven poets, a cook, and a boatman. The poets came to this northern Spanish island to commune and translate one another’s poems. The cook fed us and the boatman ferried us to the mainland as needed.
The island’s history was heavy. Franco sent his enemies here to be executed. First a prison, the island then became a military garrison, and finally a place for the incurable, the hopeless, and the mentally ill.
Now it was a place for governmental use. For special guests. And so, for one week, we were those special people. The poets. Each from a different corner of the world.
Every day we took a break in the afternoon, and while the others wrote, bathed, or napped, I explored the tiny island, so small that it took only fifteen minutes to walk its shores from one end to the other.
Franco carried out his executions beyon
d the bridge where we stayed. A sign said this was the priests’ section. As I walked toward the extreme end of the island, I reached a wall against which Franco shot men. Behind it was a roofless room with rock walls and five unmarked graves of various sizes. Next to that was a large enclosure in which the stone man stood. We were chin to chin if I stood on my tiptoes. Hombre sin miedo, the man without fear, facing the water. When I entered the enclosure, the air changed color.
He had been waiting. Eyes carved wide, full lips, arms folded, hands twice the size of mine, he was deprived of feet. Was it because the artist ran out of patience or time? Did he fear that his creation might one day unroot and walk into the sea? Why did he name him the man without fear?
I visited this section every day. First the buried unknowns, for whom I would sing, then my hombre sin miedo, with whom I spoke. He was a good listener. And I had so much to confess. But I will not tell it here. Some sins are only for ears made of stone.
I ran my fingers along his deep-carved eyes, his large head, his lichen-covered torso. Who would have thought stone could be so soft, so sensual? To love a man made of stone is no different from loving a poet long dead. It’s mostly the presence that you love. The heart is not always drawn to what is made of flesh. Isn’t the body a vehicle for the soul? Who’s to say that the duende of my hombre sin miedo was not tied to a spirit behind that wall?
I put my lips on his. The breeze shivered. The ghosts next door watched us from among the tree branches. The water’s music shifted to a lower key. The birds hovered. And as I closed my eyes, a draft of air lifted my red scarf and wrapped it around his thick stony neck. My hombre sin miedo.
