Poetry Feature: The Kiss


Drawing © 2001 Catherine Thompson (See Other Arts)

Second Kiss
Madeline Artenberg

I Like Your Curled
Oreste Belletto

SmallMouth
Oreste Belletto

Amaretto Kisses
Peter Chelnik

Morning After
Blake Dawson

The Last Civilized Man
George Dickerson

The Kiss
Charles Fishman

Words
Dana Gioia

Warm Kisses, Glass Tongues
Daniela Gioseffi

You Are Late to My Life
Maureen Holm

Mouthing Off
Nicholas Johnson

We Never Know
Yusef Komunyakaa

First Kiss
Elaine Schwager

hymn
Susan Scutti

Kissing Charles
Sheryl H. Simler

~ . ~ . ~

Second Kiss
Madeline Artenberg

Our mouths reintroduce themselves,
lips no longer held hard,
teeth take a back seat,
tongues advance in lengthy rhumba.
Cresting in repetition,
receding in tide,
bathed in insistence,
we are lone swimmers
diving over and over.

 
~ . ~

I Like Your Curled
Oreste Belletto

I like your
curled beneath me
smooth legs and outside
wind pushing trees against the house
of your mouth

I brush my lips
where the window meets the leaf
each separate nerve
grows a bud

 
~ .

Small Mouth
Oreste Belletto

With such a small mouth,
you must fear the kiss,
and men who engulf you.

Yet you beckon
from your conch, and its pink
descending path.

Love for you has majesty
of the ocean's tall swells
and gnashing breakers.

The voice in the tide
caresses your foot
then crests you by surprise.

What a small thing
your innocence rides
out on the waves.

(This is Oreste Belletto's first appearance in the magazine.
Other work has appeared in The Lullwater Review,
The Lilliput Review, BAPC (The Bay Area Poets Coalition),
and is upcoming in Words On A Wire. He lives in Northern California.)

 
~ . ~

Amaretto Kisses
Peter Chelnik

Hip-swinging Rubenesque, sensual
woman, oh soul with
lipstick smear, nylon runs a penchant for
Proust, Hank Williams.
Woman with waitress forearms,
chest wrapped by queen-size
brassiere. Bring on
abundance of feathered hope,
a Fourth of July picnic
fried chicken in place.
Kisses beneath slats
of grandstand wood
black-eyed Susan in bun.

Hip-swinging woman, salvation
held in green haze of summer
like poems of Bangkok, Katmandu,
exiler of Mozambique,
I embrace you, Silver Sister,
revolutionary hands. Cigarette voice
I, clumsy on Ouija board, distracted
by overhead crows a glass ceiling
bold-fringed demons.
You, Sister, take me in, real strong
like strawberry shortcake
Michigan sunlight, bushels of
cattails, Amaretto kisses
deep into the afternoon.
 
~ . ~

Morning After
for Géraldine
Blake Dawson

Spiral sighs rest light on air
after nights of revel roar.
Caught in blankets' tangled snare,
enmeshed in dreaming, spirits soar
deep in the glow of passion's bliss
--Such joy! the seed . . . a simple kiss.

Simple, say, though the Muse knows better
how well the moon plays out Her role,
how desire breathes the perfect letter
--drawn reflection of your soul. O!
womanly wiles, gently strum, with your tears,
my heartstrings to singing among the spheres.

But morning casts another light,
filtered gold through curtains drawn.
The painted woman of the night's
transformed, soft child of the dawn . . .
Rest on my chest your fingertips.
How sweet . . . your lightly parted lips.

(Prior publ. Dawson, Footprints of a Hunter (New Legend, 2001))
(Blake Dawson is a Contributing Editor/Paris.)
 
~ . ~

The Last Civilized Man
George Dickerson

Remember my drawings at Lascaux
Where I taught you of the bison's foe
And the cave-dark dread of the tiger's claw
Before you raised the antelope bone
And crushed my skull in apparent awe?
You only pretended to atone.

Recall the righteous Sand Creek slaughter
While I played my flute to try and capture
The magical voice of the sacred water?
I went down in the rapacious rapture
Of your blood-lust troops. You cantered after
Your horses hushed my Cheyenne daughter.

It was not enough that I carved from bone
The whale cavorting by the Arctic shore
Or built a house for God in stone
At Chartres, at Memphis for you alone.
You were infatuated with more
And ordered your priest to gut my core.

Like a drunken Russian poet, I hung
Myself from a dacha's rafter
For the metered words I had writ and sung
Amid your bureaucratic laughter.
You arched your brow. You clucked your tongue.
That you could not read is what really stung.

I designed the Minoan labyrinth;
At Salisbury Plain I laid a plinth.
On an inquisitorial rack,
For your sweet sacrament's sake,
You tore my ligaments, you snapped my back,
Then burnt my pagan soul at stake.

Regard sad Vincent's slashed-off ear:
There was nothing there for you to fear.
Why then drag Lorca from his peasant's hut
To have him so summarily shot?
You would have bought sweet Chopin off,
But he went and died of a bloody cough.

I give up. I'll join your ilk.
I'll wrap my thighs in the finest silk.
But beware my artful guile,
My pigskin glove, my cashmere coat;
I'll clutch you to my breast and smile
When I kiss your cheek and slit your throat.

© 1997, 2000, 2001 George Dickerson
(Selected Poems, 1959-1999, Rattapallax Press 2000)
 
~ . ~

The Kiss
Charles Fishman

The kiss begins in their fingers
in their toes a low hum that scythes
October grass It moves like smoke
through the dark halls of their blood
a blue mist a haze against their bones

Her flesh is soft music the stretched skin
of a drum his lips his fingers will play
drawing up the melodies as from a hidden well
He breathes her in her dark lustrous tones
dark fire of her that smolders at his touch
His lips are singed by hers

How good it is to be awakened from death
and consumed, to burn to ashy cinder
and to rise again And she, too, drinks
at the sacred well leans into the wings of fire
he opens for her so that the veil of her body
spangles into flame

(A bio note about and other work by Charles Fishman appear in the July issue. His new collection, Country of Memory, will be published by Rattapallax Press in March 2002.)
 
~ . ~

Words
Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.


(From Gioia, Interrogations at Noon, Graywolf, St.Paul, 2001)
~ . ~

Warm Kisses, Glass Tongues
Daniela Gioseffi

A lost love leaps from the fire of my brow.
I zipper him away.
I can't feed bears to angels.
Angels are not there.
Goodbye, my friends,
you've all turned into keyholes.
I'm no different than a camel or a tiger.
My ears bark at candles.
I try to burn all of Keats in the ashtrays.

Though I remember only the rhythm of his speech,
I carve a pear from memory
trying to bite his face into it.
Somewhere sand curves down into the pampering sea.
I think of all the rain
falling backwards toward the birth of money.

Chopin's Nocturnes bind my chest with wires.
A true lover that doesn't exist
tiptoes toward me, a thousand genitalia protrude
or gape from it.
It raises its head.
Its eyes are mirrors
arranged to reflect mirrors in me.
It opens its mouth,
revealing glass tongues coated with silver.

I feed it warm kisses from my mouth
and it sings an ancient lullaby
audible only to the trees.
 
~ . ~

You Are Late to My Life
Maureen Holm

You are late to my life bearing fruit
plums that were bruised while green
the apple's highung core.
Others have loved me long and more beautiful.
I will leave us soon.

You are late to my life wearing thin
the same patch already raveled
that you claim holds
with knitted brow, stiffened chin as tattered
sleeve scolds elbow.

You are late to my life caring little
for the swallow or the tree
much for the chew and bough.
I am sleek for gnawing on the bark of your mouth.
You bleed from the nettles.

 
~ . ~

Mouthing Off
Nicholas Johnson

I like first of all how you look
when I tell you what I want to do
with your mouth. How disappointed
you were when I suggested putting it
on a bird's wing. You wanted something
more imaginative but there's only
so much you can do with your mouth
or anyone's mouth. If I hadn't been
so sick I'd probably know your mouth
a lot better. It looks practical
and generous and fun when it gets going.
I wonder if it will make me feel
like a bear that's found a nice place
to hibernate and if I'll get to know
all of its Shelleyan overtones.
I like reading your lips before
they say what they're going to say
and the tangents your mouth goes off on
happily inventing some new geometry.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not just asking
for lip service, but simply the need
to explore more intimate countries
that meet somewhere on a plain
flapping with curtains and teal
branches, where a mouth meeting a mouth
can really take you from here to there
as if finally winning over the eternal
event, the last tournament, flying
high with colors even higher
in the wooded summer.

(Prior publ. Bad Henry Review)
 
~ . ~

We Never Know
Yusef Komunyakaa

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

(Prior publ. Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988))
 
~ . ~

First Kiss
Elaine Schwager

This is it: your body
belongs to your fantasies now.

In your nightmares, God's valet
removes with alcohol-soaked

cotton balls the thin layers
of mind you so obediently took on.

Now that boy who played Pied Piper,
promises to clear a way for you

through rats as his heart
pounds and his note settle

inside you. There, you can't tell
your puppy from a sneaker or a string

of jewels from the bar of
a cage. And sky seems so like

the skin of raw fish, you think
you should be swimming.

Sweetheart, beware of
gravity, even if you're not

falling. And don't pitch
your ball right

into forgiveness.
You might hit a ghost.
~ . ~
hymn
susan scutti

he is the one who persisted and persisting
preferred the what that is me
to any other whom
he might whim or waste or want.

i will be the width
which he fills
to spill his spew;
i will be his shoe: an inside
for his outside to come in-side.

how different from a kiss!

a kiss is nothing like love.

there's no inner/outer
contradiction in a kiss, only
parity, symmetry, equality
in a kiss...
there's no perversion,
no religious conversion.

now how i anguish him
to express his pain in poetry
through me.

ever the eye (always the i)
i want to cede and be seen
blinking and thinking and walking and talking:
a model, Inspiration,
i tiptoe each runway line,
brink the breaks
and slide from stanza to stanza
murmuring the mysterious
hum of him.
 
~ . ~

Kissing Charles
Sheryl H. Simler

I.

Granted, it was only a dream
But I finally gave in
And must admit was more
Than my fantasy had conjured

Like ballet on a Sunday
Afternoon with brunch and
All the trimmings and
Then you stroll
Through Central Park on an
Almost beginning of June Spring Day

And the weeping willow tree
Fans the heat still missiling
Through your body and the
Robins form a chorus line to
Greet you at their palace

 
II.

Kissing Charles would be decadent
And ill-fated, like pressing your
Luck one more time, hoping karma's
On vacation and your shrink
Never heard a word you said
About all the poor selections and
Devils who have a thing for you
Despite the neon halo

Kisses cannot comprehend the
Mission of the budding soul
And so I leave you, Charles,
Among daisy chains and cool water
And hope you'll journey far away
Where my longings, worn and tattered,
Cease to spool the fishhook of
Your twisted invitation.


(Prior publ. Salonika)
(This is Sheryl H. Simler's first appearance in the magazine.
Her work has won prizes in past Lyric Recovery™ sessions.
She lives in New York City.)
~ . ~ . ~