—He placed his beer on the pool’s lip, then pulled me into his. I’ll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a drag of Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high.
—Through a chain-link. Soccer field. Drummer in a punk band.
—Curled around my firstborn’s body, flesh-drunk, I kissed her chins and cheeks and tiny soft lips which parted, and for the briefest of moments we soul-kissed.
—I’d met the boy from the next town on my sixteenth birthday, in line at the DMV. He told me I was pretty and asked for my number. I’d never felt so grown up in my life. When he called, I said yes, so he picked me up and drove me to a lake with a boathouse. Once inside, he licked my face.
The next time he called I begged my sister to tell him I’d been sent to boarding school. She did, but charged me thirty minutes of back-scratching.
—Years before, my sister and I practiced on each other in a hotel bathroom. We also critiqued each other’s “sexy walk.” We never spoke of this again.
—After snowmobiling in Wisconsin. His lips were so chapped that they cracked mid-kiss and I swallowed his blood. I thought this should end up meaning more than it ended up meaning.
—Sitting on the fountain rim in Prague, I heard a commotion behind me. Before I could turn, something slicked the back of my neck—bird droppings?—and then the skinny back of a Romani (“Gypsies,” I’d been warned by the Czechs, “all thieves”) sprinted past, his hoot lingering after his boot soles flashed around the corner.
Was it a dare? An insult? Panicked flirtation? A distraction designed to remove my wallet from my bag? Here I sit, twice-my-life away, puckered, still responding to that kiss.
—The one with the girl. I kissed her not for her sake, or my own, but for the boys who were egging us on. Were I again presented with her soft lips, I’d do better.
—Strange that after all the lips, the censored kiss is the one I gave my daughter. Fourteen years ago I published a poem about it, which, the editor said, received some “interesting” feedback. Hate emails. All from women.
Recently, I found them. This time, they struck me as funny. Maybe, I thought—for so this world ripens us—maybe the women would, too.
—What’s a kiss but two eels grappling in a cave of spit? Best not to overthink it.
—My grad school boyfriend had a mustache and beard. I didn’t imagine I’d like them, but I did. I could kiss him for hours, the halo of scratchy hair making the central hot-soft even hot-softer.
But then came the month when we couldn’t make rent, so he got a job delivering pizza, a spectacularly bad idea. Fayetteville’s streets twisted around hills, and he had no sense of direction, so his pizzas were reliably late and cold. Tipping actually was just a city in China. Within three months he’d get rear-ended by a bozo without insurance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I wanted to tell you: drivers had to be clean-shaven. It was policy.
Before his first shift, he took a razor from its package. He entered the bathroom hirsute, and exited . . . wrong. I kissed him, and the kiss, too, was wrong. He slumped on the bed with his red, scraped jowls. “Wait a minute,” I whispered, inspired, “I’ll be right back.” I took his razor and shaved “down there,” shaved off every single hair. I thought it would be a turn-on, but I didn’t feel sexy. Not at all. I looked like a child, like a Barbie. Now we were in it together, broke, depressed, slumped, razor-burned, and bald-jowled.
Reader, I married him.
—Today is our daughter’s fifteenth birthday. These days, she and I rarely kiss.
—Maybe, at the end, there will be a reckoning of kisses. Maybe, along with good deeds, they tally our generosities of flesh. Maybe how we’re judged is this: Were you a waste of breath? Maybe eternity feels like an endless kiss.