We asked poets to tell us who was their first kiss in poetry or prose
Michelle Bitting, Susan Deer Cloud, Zan Gay, Kathleen Hellen, Paul Hostovsky, Elizabeth Jacobson, Jennifer Litt, Linda Pastan, John L. Stanizzi,
Diane Thiel, Julie Marie Wade, Cynthia White, Mary Jane White, Patricia Zylius
Diane Thiel, Julie Marie Wade, Cynthia White, Mary Jane White, Patricia Zylius
Poets who chose to include a statement specifying who their first kiss was, when it took place, and where, is not necessarily addressed in the poem that follows it (if a poem follows it).
Michelle Bitting
First kiss:
Paul Streiber in sixth grade, in the old wooden A-frame church at my Episcopal school in Los Angeles.
Michelle Bitting’s third collection is The Couple Who Fell to Earth named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016. She has published poems and prose in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Vinyl Poetry, Plume, Diode and others. Bitting is a recipient of the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. A fourth collection, Broken Kingdom is due out in 2019. Visit her at michellebitting.com
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Susan Deer Cloud
First Kiss:
My first real kiss was with Bobby “James Bond” Johaneman in summer 1964, on a mountaintop in Livingston Manor, New York, in the region called the Borscht Belt after the heyday of the Jewish hotels years later embodied in the film “Dirty Dancing.”
James Bond’s Kiss ~ Susan Deer Cloud
When summer had no sense of time and I was
thirteen years of naive sensuality not suspecting
‘Sixties sexual revolution to come, I became a Bond girl
thanks to a Mohawk first cousin and third cousin.
Let us call them Mel and Jamie – wouldn’t want
their kids and grand kids to learn they were once
James Bond wannabes hot for a girl close kin.
My mother warned me early it was taboo
for me to marry Mel, our children would be born
with unicorn horns and dragon tails. Still we adored
each other, and once Mel gave me ten rings he saved up
over ten weeks from a 5 cent machine at the A&P
whose brick walls shone like red candy at our town’s
far end. “Will you marry me?” he fell to his knees,
imitating suave Hollywood stars, kneeling
in Catskill daisies, “he loves me, he loves me not,
she loves me, she loves me not.” I sniffed “No”
to my first cousin already a bit of a secret agent man,
hiding my joy over rings sparkling from every finger.
Summer 1964 Mel hooked me up with Jamie,
mutual third cousin now his best pal. A year older,
those boy gods sauntered through life as if flying,
smooth skin bronzed by sunshine, tossing off their shirts
when the heat grew too great, and Jamie tossing back
his feathery dark hair tinged with hints of flame whenever
he glanced at me. We became a triad of “part Indian” rebels,
I the dryad they lured out of her forest shyness.
We shot hoops, listened to records, swam in cold rivers,
and the gods lavished me with ice-cream sodas and movies.
Obsessed with James Bond, they treated me to “Goldfinger”
at Saturday’s matinee, enthroning me between them
and cornucopias of salty popcorn. Jamie kept sighing
in my direction, yawned and stretched his arms out until
one touched my shoulders and stayed where it landed,
his fingers straying towards my left breast beneath which
my heart was a wild drum. “Bond, James Bond,” Jamie blew
into my ear, glistening mouth shaped like Sean Connery’s
kissing Pussy Galore in the hay and me burning to follow him
anywhere. In the Country of Kissin’ Cousins,
Jamie and I sneaked off Sunday morning
for the mountain called Round Top,
mountain of the Orchard Street Cemetery,
mountain where lovers met for trysts
in woods and fields beyond the dead.
We hurried through the village of gossips,
our own “Town without Pity,” past colorless
churches and disapproving bells, breathless
arriving at the borderline between boot hill
cradling many of our people and the trees
looking over them. Jamie grabbed my hand,
we two trudging up above the caves to expanse
encircled by blackberry bushes – gold-flecked eyes
gazing into gold-flecked eyes. Same sadness in his face
as mine, same with everyone dubbed “part Indian,”
fossil-grief from a genocide abandoning us in fragments
at birth. Such Wolf Clan puppy love I felt for the boy god
indifferent to having been crushed before ever being born.
Constellations of freckles painted his high cheekbones –
howling glow his eyes. “Bond, James Bond,” he murmured
in a voice newly acquiring the technicolor timbre of a man’s.
In slow motion we tumbled onto midsummer’s wildflowers,
Jamie gifting me my first kiss, moist languor gluing us together
in tongue song invaders tried to steal from our ancestors
for as long as the grass grows and the water flows.
Susan Deer Cloud, a mixed lineage Catskill Mountain Indian, grew up in an isolated region of kissing cousins. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, her writing has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her most recent books are Hunger Moon, Before Language and The Way to Rainbow Mountain (Shabda Press). Until the Covid-19 pandemic, she divided her time between dwelling in her beloved mountains and roving in the Americas, Canada, and Europe. She is currently hunkered down at home, writing her next book and trying to remain hopeful.
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Zan Gay Coral Springs, FL
First kiss:
I was fourteen, hiding with Johnny Osowski during a game of flashlight tag, 1962 in Summerfield, Florida.
Peach
In the dark, a child’s game of night tag,
he and I hid in the grape arbor,
the August heat less
than that between us
standing apart, the shouts of the others
far away, I at fourteen in a white voile dress,
he a neighbor’s visiting grandson from Detroit,
then his arms pulling me closer,
a stem of grapes on my hair
he brushed aside
when our cheeks touched,
the moon melting clouds,
his brothers yelling our names,
and before getting caught,
he mashed his lips against mine,
his soft yet-shaven chin
a peach with the perfume
of very ripe fruit.
I tasted it still
when I watched from a window next day
his father’s station wagon crammed
with kids and suitcases
roiling up the highway north
until another, maybe, summer visit.
Zan Gay grew up in rural 1950's Florida, studied art in Florence, Italy, enjoyed art reference library work for many years. Poems published in South Florida Poetry Journal, Feminist Studies, Phoebe, Slant, Tigertail among others. Two chapbooks by Main Street Rag Press, Honeymoon Woods and He Promises The Moon Over Miami.
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Kathleen Hellen
His name was Dennis Renk (definitely), the setting was Transfiguration School, in 1965 (I think).
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. https://www.kathleenhellen.com/
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Paul Hostovsky Medfield, MA
First kiss:
I kissed Pinky full on the mouth on the lime couch in front of my television in the summer of 1968.
Pinky and Thumbs
In the catalog of my addictions,
which is in the order I acquired them,
the mouth of my cat Pinky
is preceded only by my thumb.
His mouth was the only mouth
that didn’t speak the language
of our house and television,
so I knew he’d never tell
as one by one my self-propelled
fish-mouth kisses found his mouth
and exploded, his eyes
dilating like the binocular view from space
of a world going up in smoke,
his ears changing shape like a hat
changing heads on his head.
Still as a water jug he sat
enduring as I sipped his spout
on the lime couch
in front of our television, which,
in the catalog of my addictions,
would be the third entry.
According to my sponsor Phil,
either we give them up in the order
they’re killing us, which is often the reverse order
of their acquisition, or else
we simply exchange them one for another
and they kill us cumulatively. Pinky
died when I was away at college
learning to shotgun beers and roll a joint
while steering a car with only one knee. I never
graduated. But years later, when I finally
got sober, I got myself a kitten--
he tottered around my apartment, tentative
and awkward as my new sobriety,
so I named him Thumbs. And now
we’re two old toms living together, complacent
and fixed. We’ve given up everything
including sex. He mostly likes to sit
on the kitchen table, next to my cup and my plate
while I’m eating. And mostly I just like
to let him.
Paul Hostovsky's newest book, Deaf & Blind, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net awards, and the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com
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Elizabeth Jacobson
First Kiss
Larchmont, New York, Summer 1976: A bunch of us were hanging around in some kid’s basement, finished out as a rec room for teenagers with yellow and green linoleum tiles, clerestory windows that on the outside were ground level and opened onto a lawn. There was a Chicago coin pinball machine with a young woman in a hot pink bikini petting a deer on the lit-up screen in one corner of the room and a blue homemade ping-ping table with a drooping net pushed against a wall on the other side. The room was large and damp with the muggy smell of fertilized muddy grass wafting about. Nobody smoked cigarettes or pot yet, but someone had scored a jug of sweet red wine. We sat in a circle on a faded braided rug. Timmy Tilitta spun the empty Yoo-Hoo bottle and when it stopped, the neck pointed at me. Everyone watched as he took my hand and led me through a door into a storage room, and then into a tiny closet stocked with toilet paper and boxes of tissue. He was careful not to touch my breasts as he put his hands on my bare arms and bent his head toward mine. And that was the best of it, Reader, no sexy beginning or ending. His mouth was full of drool, and it felt like he was pouring ketchup down my throat.
Elizabeth Jacobson is the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org and she teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.
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Jennifer Litt Fort Lauderdale, FL
First kiss:
Billy Backe is the first boy I remember kissing. It was 1964 in the backyard of my childhood home in Tiverton, Rhode Island.
No Added Sugar
Nestor’s candy store is Ibbotson’s Insurance now.
The grass-beaten path around Lent’s Pond, no longer
a leafy corridor to amble in heat or hear echoes of winter
skating screams when we whipped across the ice,
arms linked in a gum wrapper chain.
A faint impress of two bodies remains in the worn grass
behind my house, the scent of cesspool, too, where
Billy Backe & I rolled around & kissed in third grade,
our fireballs, sweet tarts & bicycles littering the yard.
What stinks is the scene of the real crime: Mr. Sherman’s
living room, where my desire for a blue popsicle came
with an unexpected cost. Did he fantasize a lap dance as
he sat me on his knees & fingered my breasts beneath my shirt?
I maneuvered stone walls & traipsed through switch grass
to sidestep future treats, never told a soul, not my parents
or my sister. When I shared my secret with a lover years later,
he said, Everyone has to learn about sex some way. I froze in his arms.
Jennifer Litt, Assistant Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, is the author of the poetry chapbook, Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra, 2016). Her work has appeared in many publications, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Stone Canoe and SWWIM. She lives in Fort Lauderdale.
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Michael Minassian Flower Mound, TX
First Kiss:
I kissed a girl named Julie under a streetlight in a snowstorm in Dumont, NJ in 1962.
First Kiss
I saw her swimming
towards me in a pale
puddle of sunlight
just below the surface--
a wide smile and hair,
a brown cascade
of delicate seaweed
framing her face,
her breasts,
small and round,
tipped with nipples
of pink coral.
Our lips and tongue
met. I held her
in my arms
and she wriggled past
with a shimmering tail
blue and green,
lithe as a serpent
in an ancient sea.
Michael Minassian's poems and short stories have appeared recently in such journals as Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Poet Lore, and Third Wednesday. He is also a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017). His poetry collection, Time is Not a River, published in 2020 is available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
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Linda Pastan Chevy Chase, MD
First Kiss:
It took place in 1946,
First Kiss
In the shadowy stairwell
of our old apartment house;
in the backseat of that red convertible
or in the front, leaning
over the gearshift;
at summer camp, behind
the girls’ bunk
with the moon watching.
Memory-- as slippery
as a kiss.
I told each boy
he was the first and only.
I rushed to the mirror
to see if I was changed.
Linda Pastan's many awards include the Dylan Thomas award and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of more than 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
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John L. Stanizzi Coventry, CT
FIRST KISS
My family departed Hartford, and apartment living when I was five. No more walking up three flights of stairs to get home, no more cement slab for a backyard, no more avenue with heavy traffic all day. We moved to East Hartford which was, in those days, the “country.” This was 1954. My father bought a brand new house for $9,000 in a little development of one hundred or so small Cape Cods, all exactly the same, laid out in what used to be a cornfield. Each tiny house had a little slip of a front lawn, which was dirt when we moved in, and which my father seeded and cared for. Some people immediately put up the obligatory white picket fences, others (like us) had split-rail fences, some people planted hedges, and others did nothing, just left that little postage stamp of crabgrass just the way it was.
This was a brand new neighborhood carved out of an old corn field in the 1953. I recall so clearly that when we moved in there were no telephones installed in the houses yet. There was, however, a neighborhood phone nailed to a telephone pole about three houses up from us. For a while, that was the neighborhood’s phone, and “neighbors,” still strangers, would form a line and wait their turn to use the phone. It seemed to work out pretty well, and folks who didn’t know a single thing about each other, very quickly became friends….neighbors.
Our new house was a two-bedroom Cape with an unfinished basement, an unfinished attic, no garage, and no porch. There were three cement steps on the left side of the house, and they lead you into the tiny kitchen. There were also three cement steps in front, and those brought you into the living room.
The kids in the neighborhood (there were tons of kids!), played in the street, but we also had the back yards, which really were the best things about this neighborhood. The back yards were twice as big as the front, and they abutted what was left of a wide cornfield. The yards were separated from the cornfield by a little brook, and a stretch of woods maybe fifty yards wide and which ran the length of the street behind the houses. The neighborhood, the woods, and the cornfield all abutted Route Five.
For me, a kid from the streets of Hartford, these little woods were like a huge forest. We played army, cowboys and Indians, hide ‘n seek. We built tree forts. And when we were a little older, the woods were where we went to make-out. Living in this neighborhood would have been nothing without the woods. It would have been just another dull place where all the kids in the neighborhood crowded onto the street to play touch football, with nowhere to hide, nowhere to go to be alone, nowhere to really let your imagination run loose. Thank goodness for the woods.
It was a rather sheltered life, early on. Not until I began school and started meeting kids who didn’t live in our neighborhood did I realize that East Hartford had plenty of apartments, and that some East Hartford kids lived just the way I had lived in Hartford. It’s funny, you know. Living in the Collimore Road project gave me a feeling of superiority over the kids who lived in apartments. I mean, I knew what apartment living was like, and now I was out of it and living in a real house, with a back yard, and woods, and a cornfield. Are you kidding? It was like we were rich or something. And I loved it.
It was in one of those apartment buildings on Burnside Avenue where it happened, a surprise, an indelible memory so attached to what would become my soul that I can conjure that moment, and that feeling, instantly.
I was in seventh grade. It was Halloween, when the new chill in the air. A harbinger of what was to come, it could still be warm enough to allow you to hang onto those precious, recent memories of summer heat and bright sunshine.
We were in seventh grade, and a small group of eighth grade girls decided to have a Halloween party in the basement of the apartment building where Diane lived. I remember thinking, “Wow. We must be pretty cool for a group of girls from the eighth grade to invite us to a party, and yet not include one single eighth grade boy.” Not one. There was Diane. Lynn, Diane’s cousin (and the most beautiful girl I had ever seen). There was also Maureen and Elizabeth. The group of guys, besides me, included Greg, Gary, and Moosie.
It was an innocent enough party. We listened to records. Dion and the Belmonts’ Teenager in Love. Pretty Little Angel Eyes by Curtis Lee. Louie Louie by the Kingsmen, with a solid half hour of trying to figure out the dirty lyrics. Diane went upstairs and made popcorn in one of those “shake ‘n pop” deals that always left a layer of burned black corn on the bottom. She had brought down paper cups and big bottles of soda. It was so much fun.
I recall that so clearly. I could not remember a time that I had more fun.
When everyone was finally relaxed and having a good time, someone put on In the Still of the Night by the Five Satins. That was deadly. I know that everyone was “feeling” the song, that queasy, exciting, seventh grade thing in your gut that was somewhere between exhilarating and anxiety inducing. Everyone knew what we wanted to do, but no one really knew how to start it. It was in the air, though. It was the unspoken truth that night. There would be kissing. That was the sole purpose of this little gala.
Along with the popcorn and soda, Diane also brought down an empty wine bottle. Then as nonchalantly as if she were saying, “Let’s listen to Elvis,” she said, “Let’s play spin the bottle.”
And the Five Satins sang, Shoo-doop-en-shoo-be-do…..So before the light, hold me again, Dear, with all of your might…in the still of the night…
Oh man, you wanna talk about a run-away train of reckless, blind hormones speeding wildly down the track toward the stuff of legend. Oh mercy!
We were all seated on an old, threadbare rug on the concrete cellar floor. No couples. Yet. Just eight kids engaged in this rite of passage, instructions handed down through generations of innuendo, whispered conversations, giggled fibs. The part of this particular spin the bottle game that I always remember, and that, in a way I was very grateful for, was that it was the girls who took the lead. For example, when Diane, who was first to spin the bottle, had it land on Moosie, the Moose just sat there, his grin stuck somewhere between mortified and embarrassed. But not Diane. With purpose, she immediately walked across the rug on all fours just like a cat, as Moose just sat there looking at her, stunned. Diane took the back of Moosie’s head in her right hand, pulled his face into hers, and moving her head back and forth, her lips wet on his, gently pushed Moosie onto his back and on the floor. I must say, to the Moose’s credit, he caught on immediately, and what was supposed to be one kiss, became a full-fledged “make out” session that had to be broken up so other people could spin the bottle.
With each spin of the bottle a collective “ohhhhhhhh” rose, punctuated by laughter and silly comments, like “Go get her, Gary!” Or “Greg’s gonna fall in love!” And the laughter and commentary continued until the couple actually began kissing. Then a hush would fall on our small group and we watched with nervous amazement as our friends engaged in this kissing thing, this heated making out. The Blue Jays sang On Lover’s Island, and they spun and kissed, spun and kissed, until eventually, somehow, an unspoken pairing had taken place and the bottle was no longer part of the “game.” Gary had paired off with Elizabeth. Diane was with Moosie. Greg was with Maureen. Everyone just laid out on the rug kissing and hugging. And I say they spun the bottle, because I didn’t spin it. Everyone played but me. I wasn’t interested in kissing anyone except Diane’s cousin, Lynn, who was a full head taller than me with red hair and blue eyes. When the game started, Lynn had also refused to play. In a sophisticated, sultry kind of way she simply said, “I’m not playing.” I felt relief and I believe I offered something nonchalant and stupid like, “Pass me by.” Even though she was the same age as the other girls, she was still too old and too cool for a childish game like spin the bottle.
I was relieved that she didn’t want to play. The truth is that I had no real interest in kissing Diane or Elizabeth or Maureen. I was feeling something in my belly that had to do with Lynn only. And so with our friends splayed out over a worn out old rug on the basement floor of an East Hartford apartment building, the space lit by one small lamp on the floor, the Penguins crooning Earth Angel, Lynn and I just kind of sat across from each other, smiling shyly, and not talking.
That’s when it happened.
Lynn said, “Let’s go outside for a minute.” Outside sounded good. It would certainly be better than sitting in the middle of this kiss-fest, feeling completely out of place in the world. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go outside.”
And in my absolute naivete, I actually believed we were going outside.
It was four or five steps up into the hallway, which was completely dark except for a little moonlight that snuck in through the back opening of the building where, if there were going to be a door, that would have been the place. I could smell people’s dinners cooking. And it was much cooler now as darkness had moved in. I could feel the distinct chill of October now, much, much cooler than the afternoon had felt.
Halfway between the outside world and the lovers in the cellar, Lynn said, “Wait.” And at the same time as she said “Wait” she pushed both of my shoulders against the wooden wall, pressed her hips heavily into mine, and kissed me, pushing her tongue between my lips and between my teeth. I can still feel the excitement of the shock. I had believed we were going outside. I had believed Lynn was way, way out of my league. And I was so naïve that being shoved against the wall and kissed like that had truly come as a complete and utter and unbelievable shock. And it felt so impossibly good.
It took me all of five seconds to get the hang of it. Generations of instincts and hormones took over. I was no longer in charge. My hands held the back of Lynn’s head and pushed her face into mine. My hips pressed into her hips. The perfect darkness tinted by a splash of moonlight charged the whole experience with excitement. We stayed there in that hallway, suspended, detached from real time, alone in the world, safe to hug and kiss and make sensual sounds, forgetting actual language, not even realizing that those brief moments in the back hallway of an old apartment building in suburbia had some very real connection to what it would eventually mean to be alive, to love, to lose. And in some ways, all these years later, as old people, it’s really the same. All those old feelings, all that overwhelming excitement. It’s still there, just barely beneath the surface, and waiting, perhaps hopelessly for that magic moment to present itself again.
What came next added a layer of terror and sadness to this otherwise mystical experience. And that, of course, made it all the more real. It had something to do with a kid name Clem, a tenth grader, with his own car. Somewhere along the way I had heard that Clem found out that I had been making out with his girlfriend, though I didn’t know Lynn was his girlfriend. That fact would have certainly changed things for sure!
And you know how news travels in the middle-school universe. I had heard…from someone...that Clem was after me. He was going kick my ass for messing with his girlfriend. Something told me that telling him the truth about what happened that night would be pointless. So instead I spent the better part of seventh grade trying to avoid Lynn in school, despite the fact that I was hopelessly in love with her. I was also always on the look-out for Clem around town. I imagined him cruising the streets in his souped up ’39 Ford looking for me. He had the car. I was on foot. And believe it or not, I think that dynamic…me being on foot, would have made it easier for me to get away from him. However, as it turned out, he never did catch up with me. Time went by, the drama passed, and everyone moved on. More or less.
I say “more or less” because you do not just forget a monumental night like the one Lynn and I had in the hallway on Burnside Avenue. Clem or no Clem. Boyfriend or no boyfriend. Seventh grade or eighth. None of that mattered. What happened in that hallway actually happened. And in those few moments, my life was catapulted from simple and innocent, to complicated and frightening. And it lives inside me still, alive and as real as it ever was.
And The Heartbeats sang, You're a thousand miles away-ay, but I still have your love to remember you by. Oh, my dar-are--arling…
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, and his brand new collection, Sundowning. John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tar River, and Poetlore. His work has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, The Journal of Italian Translations Bonafini, Poetarium, and others. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. His nonfiction has been published in Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, Scarlet Leaf, Literature and Belief, and Evening Street. For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com.
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Diane Thiel Albuquerque, NM
First Kiss:
My first kiss was unexpected, strangely-timed, but memorable in its own way; it was in Miami Beach, probably 1980. On the edge of the street, in front of what I think was his house, while I was holding the handlebars of my bike, BC suddenly kissed me, and I kissed him back.
The Far End of the Neighborhood
On my bike again, taking the freedom
to ride out and look around
the far end of the neighborhood.
When he waved me to stop,
I was surprised he even knew me.
He was in the popular crowd.
We stood and chatted a while,
but I couldn’t say
a single thing we talked about.
School? Was he moving away?
His hair late seventies long,
sunkissed around his face.
I was still standing over my bike
holding the handlebars.
We said goodbye, and then
he leaned toward me, put his hand
behind my head (no helmet in those days
to stop him)
and kissed me on the lips,
salty in the Florida heat.
It might have been his thing,
something he was trying out,
hailing passing girls on bikes
to add to his confidence,
practice his technique.
Maybe. Regardless,
it was a moment, and then
that was it.
No pursuit, romance, break-up
or heartbreak. It came out of nowhere
and went nowhere. Yet here it is,
in a certain groove of memory.
And somehow, we each took it
in that moment,
and at least one of us also over time,
for what it was.
Diane Thiel is the author of ten books of poetry and nonfiction. Her new book of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Thiel's work has appeared widely, including in Poetry and The Hudson Review, and is re-printed in numerous anthologies. Her awards include PEN, NEA and Fulbright Awards. A native Floridian, Thiel is Professor and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico. With her husband and four children, she has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. www.dianethiel.net
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Julie Marie Wade Dania Beach, FL
First kiss:
I kissed Ari Mattson freshman year in front of Eastvold Chapel on our college campus in Parkland, Washington.
"In the College Square (October 5, 1997)” appears in the limited-edition, hybrid-forms chapbook, P*R*I*D*E, released in June 2020 by the Hunger Mountain/ Vermont College of Fine Arts May Day Studio.
In the College Square (October 5, 1997)
My first real kiss doesn’t come until college. By “real,” I mean chosen, I mean wished-for, I mean desired. Other kisses were stolen, rushed, or incomplete, but this kiss was freely given, deliberate as a will. I felt I had almost died trying to find him—the boy who was willing, the young man who would kiss me back.
First, I verified. “It kind of seems like you might want to kiss me?” He nodded. So I bent toward the boy, the young man in his crisp blue jeans, his Jars of Clay tee. We were eighteen, but we didn’t seem like adults or children. I suppose we were hybrid forms.
Ari stood so tall I had to rise up on my toes and lift my mouth toward him. He was lean as the lampposts in the college square—his shadow pointing like the straightest line, mine an assemblage of curves. Zig-zag.
We kissed after dinner and a stroll around campus, there in front of the chapel and across from the dorms—there where anyone at all might have been watching, though I’m not sure anyone was. A weeknight. The students scattered like marbles: away games and study sessions. A Veggie Tales marathon in a rumpus room somewhere. This was a Christian school.
During the kiss: I felt invigorated. Afterwards: triumphant. I had done it! I had joined the club! I was a woman who kissed and was kissed in return!
And though I didn’t know the word then, it seems to me now my first official kiss was really a MacGuffin—the culmination of a quest that turned out to be the commencement of a question. Who did I want to kiss now that kissing was a given of my life?
Once, a woman whose son was “struggling with his sexuality” told me the advice she had given him: “Just find a hot guy and kiss him. It’ll take five seconds, and then you’ll know for sure.” But will he? For sure? And what exactly will he know?
I already liked the idea of kissing, so I knew I would relish the act. Liking seemed foreshadowed, entirely inevitable. And if the kiss was supposed to prove, as my mother said, that I was in fact “a normal, red-blooded, American girl,” well then, mission accomplished!
I was happy kissing Ari. I didn’t have to force myself to do it. Soon, though, I wanted to kiss longer and harder, like a novice student in a chemistry lab—What does this do? What about this? And this?
It was Ari who said we needed “to put on the brakes.” It was Ari who said Jesus wouldn’t approve if we “succumbed to temptation.”
I kissed the first man, the second man, then the third man, who was also, briefly, my fiancé. I grew confident in my kissing, decadent in my kissing. I became one of those people who summits the mountain so she can say she has, but also so she can know she has. Do you really think the climber doesn’t enjoy any aspect of the climb—that it’s all purely grueling, misery from base camp to apogee?
I think most climbers must appreciate the fresh air, the days with clear skies, and especially the campfire stories. After all, the stories they tell on the mountain are stories of climbers like themselves—people who summit mountains just like the one underfoot. In those stories, every character is a mirror for teller and listener alike.
I’ll say it again to dispel any myths: I liked kissing my boyfriends. But remember: I also liked kissing my pillow, and the back of my hand, the washcloths and sponges, any plush toy. Those were the days of glorious, selfish kissing, when my singular mouth aspired to consume the whole world.
It would take a woman—and not just any woman, and not just any "hot" woman either, but a most particular one—for my kisses to transmit a message, to convey a feeling, and to receive these both in return. So many soliloquys in a soundproof room, those first years of kissing! And then at last: a mouth that answered fluently: a dialogue of words and more than words.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 12 collections of poetry and prose, including the book-length lyric essay Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach.
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Cynthia White Santa Cruz, CA
First kiss:
kissed Ricardo Osorio in 1971, my freshman year of high school, on a neighbor's couch in Whittier, California.
Fourteen
Who can even remember?
Whose slumbering child
I was sitting that night,
how many bottles of Boone’s Farm
the boy and I guzzled
before going nose to nose,
our untested lips barely
brushing. The plush nap
of the couch thrilling my neck.
How late did the telephone shrill
its alarm? My mother.
If the boy confided. If I
stayed quiet. So many intimate
particulars I can’t get back.
But didn’t I tear
three buttons from his shirt?
And wasn’t it good? My mouth
all summer an exquisite ache.
Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Narrative, New Letters, and Grist among others. She was a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of The Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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Mary Jane White Waukon, IA
Lindeman
Your last name’s the one I remember. Director
of our all-American chorus, you led me alone
into the sandhills, told me how you were named
for the lindens that grow like smaller oaks
or elms in Europe’s parks, and which, translated
into English, are ‘lime trees’ usually.
You were smaller too; your head and profile
should have crowned a height of six or seven feet.
Lindeman is spicy now I’ve smelled a linden blooming
and been reminded a time or two of you
kissing me, first of anyone. A lime has always been
a green lemon to my mind, but I thought you yellower then,
with age. Now so many have kissed me too.
Still, of them all, you were my good instructor,
the single, high-placed person I hoped to hold
as you would open your arms in preparation for a note
to break from, as I would guess, two hundred girls.
I was your girl, that one day only, at the beach,
where you noticed me out of six or seven. We’d worked
to bury you, helpless to the neck. Dark glasses.
That left your voice and even teeth. Deep breath.
Sand broke off your chest. Alarming. Now I would rhyme
with my early thinking, call it charming.
Then we walked, not far, and sat without a towel.
No waves, no stars, no air to gasp to start with.
Your hand ran under my suit-strap and let it snap.
I thought probably I would hate you, but I have not.
Mary Jane White is a retired trial lawyer who also holds a MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, one in poetry and one in translation. Her Tsvetaeva translations appear along with early original poems in Starry Sky to Starry Sky (Holy Cow! Press 1988) New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke (Adastra Press 2007); Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013). After Russia: Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End and New Year’s (a bilingual text) is forthcoming in 2020 from Adelaide Books (NYC/Lisbon). Contact her at [email protected].
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Patricia Zylius Santa Cruz, CA
First kiss:
I was twelve, in 1959, outside playing hide and seek in a Southern California beach town. His name was John. He squeezed me to him and pressed his lips against mine.
Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Passager, Sequestrum, Juniper, Ellipsis,Natural Bridge, Red Wheelbarrow, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems have also been included in In Plein Air, Women Artists Datebook, and The Yes Book.
Michelle Bitting
First kiss:
Paul Streiber in sixth grade, in the old wooden A-frame church at my Episcopal school in Los Angeles.
Michelle Bitting’s third collection is The Couple Who Fell to Earth named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016. She has published poems and prose in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Vinyl Poetry, Plume, Diode and others. Bitting is a recipient of the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. A fourth collection, Broken Kingdom is due out in 2019. Visit her at michellebitting.com
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Susan Deer Cloud
First Kiss:
My first real kiss was with Bobby “James Bond” Johaneman in summer 1964, on a mountaintop in Livingston Manor, New York, in the region called the Borscht Belt after the heyday of the Jewish hotels years later embodied in the film “Dirty Dancing.”
James Bond’s Kiss ~ Susan Deer Cloud
When summer had no sense of time and I was
thirteen years of naive sensuality not suspecting
‘Sixties sexual revolution to come, I became a Bond girl
thanks to a Mohawk first cousin and third cousin.
Let us call them Mel and Jamie – wouldn’t want
their kids and grand kids to learn they were once
James Bond wannabes hot for a girl close kin.
My mother warned me early it was taboo
for me to marry Mel, our children would be born
with unicorn horns and dragon tails. Still we adored
each other, and once Mel gave me ten rings he saved up
over ten weeks from a 5 cent machine at the A&P
whose brick walls shone like red candy at our town’s
far end. “Will you marry me?” he fell to his knees,
imitating suave Hollywood stars, kneeling
in Catskill daisies, “he loves me, he loves me not,
she loves me, she loves me not.” I sniffed “No”
to my first cousin already a bit of a secret agent man,
hiding my joy over rings sparkling from every finger.
Summer 1964 Mel hooked me up with Jamie,
mutual third cousin now his best pal. A year older,
those boy gods sauntered through life as if flying,
smooth skin bronzed by sunshine, tossing off their shirts
when the heat grew too great, and Jamie tossing back
his feathery dark hair tinged with hints of flame whenever
he glanced at me. We became a triad of “part Indian” rebels,
I the dryad they lured out of her forest shyness.
We shot hoops, listened to records, swam in cold rivers,
and the gods lavished me with ice-cream sodas and movies.
Obsessed with James Bond, they treated me to “Goldfinger”
at Saturday’s matinee, enthroning me between them
and cornucopias of salty popcorn. Jamie kept sighing
in my direction, yawned and stretched his arms out until
one touched my shoulders and stayed where it landed,
his fingers straying towards my left breast beneath which
my heart was a wild drum. “Bond, James Bond,” Jamie blew
into my ear, glistening mouth shaped like Sean Connery’s
kissing Pussy Galore in the hay and me burning to follow him
anywhere. In the Country of Kissin’ Cousins,
Jamie and I sneaked off Sunday morning
for the mountain called Round Top,
mountain of the Orchard Street Cemetery,
mountain where lovers met for trysts
in woods and fields beyond the dead.
We hurried through the village of gossips,
our own “Town without Pity,” past colorless
churches and disapproving bells, breathless
arriving at the borderline between boot hill
cradling many of our people and the trees
looking over them. Jamie grabbed my hand,
we two trudging up above the caves to expanse
encircled by blackberry bushes – gold-flecked eyes
gazing into gold-flecked eyes. Same sadness in his face
as mine, same with everyone dubbed “part Indian,”
fossil-grief from a genocide abandoning us in fragments
at birth. Such Wolf Clan puppy love I felt for the boy god
indifferent to having been crushed before ever being born.
Constellations of freckles painted his high cheekbones –
howling glow his eyes. “Bond, James Bond,” he murmured
in a voice newly acquiring the technicolor timbre of a man’s.
In slow motion we tumbled onto midsummer’s wildflowers,
Jamie gifting me my first kiss, moist languor gluing us together
in tongue song invaders tried to steal from our ancestors
for as long as the grass grows and the water flows.
Susan Deer Cloud, a mixed lineage Catskill Mountain Indian, grew up in an isolated region of kissing cousins. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, her writing has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her most recent books are Hunger Moon, Before Language and The Way to Rainbow Mountain (Shabda Press). Until the Covid-19 pandemic, she divided her time between dwelling in her beloved mountains and roving in the Americas, Canada, and Europe. She is currently hunkered down at home, writing her next book and trying to remain hopeful.
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Zan Gay Coral Springs, FL
First kiss:
I was fourteen, hiding with Johnny Osowski during a game of flashlight tag, 1962 in Summerfield, Florida.
Peach
In the dark, a child’s game of night tag,
he and I hid in the grape arbor,
the August heat less
than that between us
standing apart, the shouts of the others
far away, I at fourteen in a white voile dress,
he a neighbor’s visiting grandson from Detroit,
then his arms pulling me closer,
a stem of grapes on my hair
he brushed aside
when our cheeks touched,
the moon melting clouds,
his brothers yelling our names,
and before getting caught,
he mashed his lips against mine,
his soft yet-shaven chin
a peach with the perfume
of very ripe fruit.
I tasted it still
when I watched from a window next day
his father’s station wagon crammed
with kids and suitcases
roiling up the highway north
until another, maybe, summer visit.
Zan Gay grew up in rural 1950's Florida, studied art in Florence, Italy, enjoyed art reference library work for many years. Poems published in South Florida Poetry Journal, Feminist Studies, Phoebe, Slant, Tigertail among others. Two chapbooks by Main Street Rag Press, Honeymoon Woods and He Promises The Moon Over Miami.
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Kathleen Hellen
His name was Dennis Renk (definitely), the setting was Transfiguration School, in 1965 (I think).
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. https://www.kathleenhellen.com/
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Paul Hostovsky Medfield, MA
First kiss:
I kissed Pinky full on the mouth on the lime couch in front of my television in the summer of 1968.
Pinky and Thumbs
In the catalog of my addictions,
which is in the order I acquired them,
the mouth of my cat Pinky
is preceded only by my thumb.
His mouth was the only mouth
that didn’t speak the language
of our house and television,
so I knew he’d never tell
as one by one my self-propelled
fish-mouth kisses found his mouth
and exploded, his eyes
dilating like the binocular view from space
of a world going up in smoke,
his ears changing shape like a hat
changing heads on his head.
Still as a water jug he sat
enduring as I sipped his spout
on the lime couch
in front of our television, which,
in the catalog of my addictions,
would be the third entry.
According to my sponsor Phil,
either we give them up in the order
they’re killing us, which is often the reverse order
of their acquisition, or else
we simply exchange them one for another
and they kill us cumulatively. Pinky
died when I was away at college
learning to shotgun beers and roll a joint
while steering a car with only one knee. I never
graduated. But years later, when I finally
got sober, I got myself a kitten--
he tottered around my apartment, tentative
and awkward as my new sobriety,
so I named him Thumbs. And now
we’re two old toms living together, complacent
and fixed. We’ve given up everything
including sex. He mostly likes to sit
on the kitchen table, next to my cup and my plate
while I’m eating. And mostly I just like
to let him.
Paul Hostovsky's newest book, Deaf & Blind, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net awards, and the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com
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Elizabeth Jacobson
First Kiss
Larchmont, New York, Summer 1976: A bunch of us were hanging around in some kid’s basement, finished out as a rec room for teenagers with yellow and green linoleum tiles, clerestory windows that on the outside were ground level and opened onto a lawn. There was a Chicago coin pinball machine with a young woman in a hot pink bikini petting a deer on the lit-up screen in one corner of the room and a blue homemade ping-ping table with a drooping net pushed against a wall on the other side. The room was large and damp with the muggy smell of fertilized muddy grass wafting about. Nobody smoked cigarettes or pot yet, but someone had scored a jug of sweet red wine. We sat in a circle on a faded braided rug. Timmy Tilitta spun the empty Yoo-Hoo bottle and when it stopped, the neck pointed at me. Everyone watched as he took my hand and led me through a door into a storage room, and then into a tiny closet stocked with toilet paper and boxes of tissue. He was careful not to touch my breasts as he put his hands on my bare arms and bent his head toward mine. And that was the best of it, Reader, no sexy beginning or ending. His mouth was full of drool, and it felt like he was pouring ketchup down my throat.
Elizabeth Jacobson is the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org and she teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.
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Jennifer Litt Fort Lauderdale, FL
First kiss:
Billy Backe is the first boy I remember kissing. It was 1964 in the backyard of my childhood home in Tiverton, Rhode Island.
No Added Sugar
Nestor’s candy store is Ibbotson’s Insurance now.
The grass-beaten path around Lent’s Pond, no longer
a leafy corridor to amble in heat or hear echoes of winter
skating screams when we whipped across the ice,
arms linked in a gum wrapper chain.
A faint impress of two bodies remains in the worn grass
behind my house, the scent of cesspool, too, where
Billy Backe & I rolled around & kissed in third grade,
our fireballs, sweet tarts & bicycles littering the yard.
What stinks is the scene of the real crime: Mr. Sherman’s
living room, where my desire for a blue popsicle came
with an unexpected cost. Did he fantasize a lap dance as
he sat me on his knees & fingered my breasts beneath my shirt?
I maneuvered stone walls & traipsed through switch grass
to sidestep future treats, never told a soul, not my parents
or my sister. When I shared my secret with a lover years later,
he said, Everyone has to learn about sex some way. I froze in his arms.
Jennifer Litt, Assistant Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, is the author of the poetry chapbook, Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra, 2016). Her work has appeared in many publications, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Stone Canoe and SWWIM. She lives in Fort Lauderdale.
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Michael Minassian Flower Mound, TX
First Kiss:
I kissed a girl named Julie under a streetlight in a snowstorm in Dumont, NJ in 1962.
First Kiss
I saw her swimming
towards me in a pale
puddle of sunlight
just below the surface--
a wide smile and hair,
a brown cascade
of delicate seaweed
framing her face,
her breasts,
small and round,
tipped with nipples
of pink coral.
Our lips and tongue
met. I held her
in my arms
and she wriggled past
with a shimmering tail
blue and green,
lithe as a serpent
in an ancient sea.
Michael Minassian's poems and short stories have appeared recently in such journals as Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Poet Lore, and Third Wednesday. He is also a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017). His poetry collection, Time is Not a River, published in 2020 is available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
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Linda Pastan Chevy Chase, MD
First Kiss:
It took place in 1946,
First Kiss
In the shadowy stairwell
of our old apartment house;
in the backseat of that red convertible
or in the front, leaning
over the gearshift;
at summer camp, behind
the girls’ bunk
with the moon watching.
Memory-- as slippery
as a kiss.
I told each boy
he was the first and only.
I rushed to the mirror
to see if I was changed.
Linda Pastan's many awards include the Dylan Thomas award and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of more than 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
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John L. Stanizzi Coventry, CT
FIRST KISS
My family departed Hartford, and apartment living when I was five. No more walking up three flights of stairs to get home, no more cement slab for a backyard, no more avenue with heavy traffic all day. We moved to East Hartford which was, in those days, the “country.” This was 1954. My father bought a brand new house for $9,000 in a little development of one hundred or so small Cape Cods, all exactly the same, laid out in what used to be a cornfield. Each tiny house had a little slip of a front lawn, which was dirt when we moved in, and which my father seeded and cared for. Some people immediately put up the obligatory white picket fences, others (like us) had split-rail fences, some people planted hedges, and others did nothing, just left that little postage stamp of crabgrass just the way it was.
This was a brand new neighborhood carved out of an old corn field in the 1953. I recall so clearly that when we moved in there were no telephones installed in the houses yet. There was, however, a neighborhood phone nailed to a telephone pole about three houses up from us. For a while, that was the neighborhood’s phone, and “neighbors,” still strangers, would form a line and wait their turn to use the phone. It seemed to work out pretty well, and folks who didn’t know a single thing about each other, very quickly became friends….neighbors.
Our new house was a two-bedroom Cape with an unfinished basement, an unfinished attic, no garage, and no porch. There were three cement steps on the left side of the house, and they lead you into the tiny kitchen. There were also three cement steps in front, and those brought you into the living room.
The kids in the neighborhood (there were tons of kids!), played in the street, but we also had the back yards, which really were the best things about this neighborhood. The back yards were twice as big as the front, and they abutted what was left of a wide cornfield. The yards were separated from the cornfield by a little brook, and a stretch of woods maybe fifty yards wide and which ran the length of the street behind the houses. The neighborhood, the woods, and the cornfield all abutted Route Five.
For me, a kid from the streets of Hartford, these little woods were like a huge forest. We played army, cowboys and Indians, hide ‘n seek. We built tree forts. And when we were a little older, the woods were where we went to make-out. Living in this neighborhood would have been nothing without the woods. It would have been just another dull place where all the kids in the neighborhood crowded onto the street to play touch football, with nowhere to hide, nowhere to go to be alone, nowhere to really let your imagination run loose. Thank goodness for the woods.
It was a rather sheltered life, early on. Not until I began school and started meeting kids who didn’t live in our neighborhood did I realize that East Hartford had plenty of apartments, and that some East Hartford kids lived just the way I had lived in Hartford. It’s funny, you know. Living in the Collimore Road project gave me a feeling of superiority over the kids who lived in apartments. I mean, I knew what apartment living was like, and now I was out of it and living in a real house, with a back yard, and woods, and a cornfield. Are you kidding? It was like we were rich or something. And I loved it.
It was in one of those apartment buildings on Burnside Avenue where it happened, a surprise, an indelible memory so attached to what would become my soul that I can conjure that moment, and that feeling, instantly.
I was in seventh grade. It was Halloween, when the new chill in the air. A harbinger of what was to come, it could still be warm enough to allow you to hang onto those precious, recent memories of summer heat and bright sunshine.
We were in seventh grade, and a small group of eighth grade girls decided to have a Halloween party in the basement of the apartment building where Diane lived. I remember thinking, “Wow. We must be pretty cool for a group of girls from the eighth grade to invite us to a party, and yet not include one single eighth grade boy.” Not one. There was Diane. Lynn, Diane’s cousin (and the most beautiful girl I had ever seen). There was also Maureen and Elizabeth. The group of guys, besides me, included Greg, Gary, and Moosie.
It was an innocent enough party. We listened to records. Dion and the Belmonts’ Teenager in Love. Pretty Little Angel Eyes by Curtis Lee. Louie Louie by the Kingsmen, with a solid half hour of trying to figure out the dirty lyrics. Diane went upstairs and made popcorn in one of those “shake ‘n pop” deals that always left a layer of burned black corn on the bottom. She had brought down paper cups and big bottles of soda. It was so much fun.
I recall that so clearly. I could not remember a time that I had more fun.
When everyone was finally relaxed and having a good time, someone put on In the Still of the Night by the Five Satins. That was deadly. I know that everyone was “feeling” the song, that queasy, exciting, seventh grade thing in your gut that was somewhere between exhilarating and anxiety inducing. Everyone knew what we wanted to do, but no one really knew how to start it. It was in the air, though. It was the unspoken truth that night. There would be kissing. That was the sole purpose of this little gala.
Along with the popcorn and soda, Diane also brought down an empty wine bottle. Then as nonchalantly as if she were saying, “Let’s listen to Elvis,” she said, “Let’s play spin the bottle.”
And the Five Satins sang, Shoo-doop-en-shoo-be-do…..So before the light, hold me again, Dear, with all of your might…in the still of the night…
Oh man, you wanna talk about a run-away train of reckless, blind hormones speeding wildly down the track toward the stuff of legend. Oh mercy!
We were all seated on an old, threadbare rug on the concrete cellar floor. No couples. Yet. Just eight kids engaged in this rite of passage, instructions handed down through generations of innuendo, whispered conversations, giggled fibs. The part of this particular spin the bottle game that I always remember, and that, in a way I was very grateful for, was that it was the girls who took the lead. For example, when Diane, who was first to spin the bottle, had it land on Moosie, the Moose just sat there, his grin stuck somewhere between mortified and embarrassed. But not Diane. With purpose, she immediately walked across the rug on all fours just like a cat, as Moose just sat there looking at her, stunned. Diane took the back of Moosie’s head in her right hand, pulled his face into hers, and moving her head back and forth, her lips wet on his, gently pushed Moosie onto his back and on the floor. I must say, to the Moose’s credit, he caught on immediately, and what was supposed to be one kiss, became a full-fledged “make out” session that had to be broken up so other people could spin the bottle.
With each spin of the bottle a collective “ohhhhhhhh” rose, punctuated by laughter and silly comments, like “Go get her, Gary!” Or “Greg’s gonna fall in love!” And the laughter and commentary continued until the couple actually began kissing. Then a hush would fall on our small group and we watched with nervous amazement as our friends engaged in this kissing thing, this heated making out. The Blue Jays sang On Lover’s Island, and they spun and kissed, spun and kissed, until eventually, somehow, an unspoken pairing had taken place and the bottle was no longer part of the “game.” Gary had paired off with Elizabeth. Diane was with Moosie. Greg was with Maureen. Everyone just laid out on the rug kissing and hugging. And I say they spun the bottle, because I didn’t spin it. Everyone played but me. I wasn’t interested in kissing anyone except Diane’s cousin, Lynn, who was a full head taller than me with red hair and blue eyes. When the game started, Lynn had also refused to play. In a sophisticated, sultry kind of way she simply said, “I’m not playing.” I felt relief and I believe I offered something nonchalant and stupid like, “Pass me by.” Even though she was the same age as the other girls, she was still too old and too cool for a childish game like spin the bottle.
I was relieved that she didn’t want to play. The truth is that I had no real interest in kissing Diane or Elizabeth or Maureen. I was feeling something in my belly that had to do with Lynn only. And so with our friends splayed out over a worn out old rug on the basement floor of an East Hartford apartment building, the space lit by one small lamp on the floor, the Penguins crooning Earth Angel, Lynn and I just kind of sat across from each other, smiling shyly, and not talking.
That’s when it happened.
Lynn said, “Let’s go outside for a minute.” Outside sounded good. It would certainly be better than sitting in the middle of this kiss-fest, feeling completely out of place in the world. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go outside.”
And in my absolute naivete, I actually believed we were going outside.
It was four or five steps up into the hallway, which was completely dark except for a little moonlight that snuck in through the back opening of the building where, if there were going to be a door, that would have been the place. I could smell people’s dinners cooking. And it was much cooler now as darkness had moved in. I could feel the distinct chill of October now, much, much cooler than the afternoon had felt.
Halfway between the outside world and the lovers in the cellar, Lynn said, “Wait.” And at the same time as she said “Wait” she pushed both of my shoulders against the wooden wall, pressed her hips heavily into mine, and kissed me, pushing her tongue between my lips and between my teeth. I can still feel the excitement of the shock. I had believed we were going outside. I had believed Lynn was way, way out of my league. And I was so naïve that being shoved against the wall and kissed like that had truly come as a complete and utter and unbelievable shock. And it felt so impossibly good.
It took me all of five seconds to get the hang of it. Generations of instincts and hormones took over. I was no longer in charge. My hands held the back of Lynn’s head and pushed her face into mine. My hips pressed into her hips. The perfect darkness tinted by a splash of moonlight charged the whole experience with excitement. We stayed there in that hallway, suspended, detached from real time, alone in the world, safe to hug and kiss and make sensual sounds, forgetting actual language, not even realizing that those brief moments in the back hallway of an old apartment building in suburbia had some very real connection to what it would eventually mean to be alive, to love, to lose. And in some ways, all these years later, as old people, it’s really the same. All those old feelings, all that overwhelming excitement. It’s still there, just barely beneath the surface, and waiting, perhaps hopelessly for that magic moment to present itself again.
What came next added a layer of terror and sadness to this otherwise mystical experience. And that, of course, made it all the more real. It had something to do with a kid name Clem, a tenth grader, with his own car. Somewhere along the way I had heard that Clem found out that I had been making out with his girlfriend, though I didn’t know Lynn was his girlfriend. That fact would have certainly changed things for sure!
And you know how news travels in the middle-school universe. I had heard…from someone...that Clem was after me. He was going kick my ass for messing with his girlfriend. Something told me that telling him the truth about what happened that night would be pointless. So instead I spent the better part of seventh grade trying to avoid Lynn in school, despite the fact that I was hopelessly in love with her. I was also always on the look-out for Clem around town. I imagined him cruising the streets in his souped up ’39 Ford looking for me. He had the car. I was on foot. And believe it or not, I think that dynamic…me being on foot, would have made it easier for me to get away from him. However, as it turned out, he never did catch up with me. Time went by, the drama passed, and everyone moved on. More or less.
I say “more or less” because you do not just forget a monumental night like the one Lynn and I had in the hallway on Burnside Avenue. Clem or no Clem. Boyfriend or no boyfriend. Seventh grade or eighth. None of that mattered. What happened in that hallway actually happened. And in those few moments, my life was catapulted from simple and innocent, to complicated and frightening. And it lives inside me still, alive and as real as it ever was.
And The Heartbeats sang, You're a thousand miles away-ay, but I still have your love to remember you by. Oh, my dar-are--arling…
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, and his brand new collection, Sundowning. John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tar River, and Poetlore. His work has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, The Journal of Italian Translations Bonafini, Poetarium, and others. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. His nonfiction has been published in Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, Scarlet Leaf, Literature and Belief, and Evening Street. For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com.
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Diane Thiel Albuquerque, NM
First Kiss:
My first kiss was unexpected, strangely-timed, but memorable in its own way; it was in Miami Beach, probably 1980. On the edge of the street, in front of what I think was his house, while I was holding the handlebars of my bike, BC suddenly kissed me, and I kissed him back.
The Far End of the Neighborhood
On my bike again, taking the freedom
to ride out and look around
the far end of the neighborhood.
When he waved me to stop,
I was surprised he even knew me.
He was in the popular crowd.
We stood and chatted a while,
but I couldn’t say
a single thing we talked about.
School? Was he moving away?
His hair late seventies long,
sunkissed around his face.
I was still standing over my bike
holding the handlebars.
We said goodbye, and then
he leaned toward me, put his hand
behind my head (no helmet in those days
to stop him)
and kissed me on the lips,
salty in the Florida heat.
It might have been his thing,
something he was trying out,
hailing passing girls on bikes
to add to his confidence,
practice his technique.
Maybe. Regardless,
it was a moment, and then
that was it.
No pursuit, romance, break-up
or heartbreak. It came out of nowhere
and went nowhere. Yet here it is,
in a certain groove of memory.
And somehow, we each took it
in that moment,
and at least one of us also over time,
for what it was.
Diane Thiel is the author of ten books of poetry and nonfiction. Her new book of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Thiel's work has appeared widely, including in Poetry and The Hudson Review, and is re-printed in numerous anthologies. Her awards include PEN, NEA and Fulbright Awards. A native Floridian, Thiel is Professor and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico. With her husband and four children, she has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. www.dianethiel.net
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Julie Marie Wade Dania Beach, FL
First kiss:
I kissed Ari Mattson freshman year in front of Eastvold Chapel on our college campus in Parkland, Washington.
"In the College Square (October 5, 1997)” appears in the limited-edition, hybrid-forms chapbook, P*R*I*D*E, released in June 2020 by the Hunger Mountain/ Vermont College of Fine Arts May Day Studio.
In the College Square (October 5, 1997)
My first real kiss doesn’t come until college. By “real,” I mean chosen, I mean wished-for, I mean desired. Other kisses were stolen, rushed, or incomplete, but this kiss was freely given, deliberate as a will. I felt I had almost died trying to find him—the boy who was willing, the young man who would kiss me back.
First, I verified. “It kind of seems like you might want to kiss me?” He nodded. So I bent toward the boy, the young man in his crisp blue jeans, his Jars of Clay tee. We were eighteen, but we didn’t seem like adults or children. I suppose we were hybrid forms.
Ari stood so tall I had to rise up on my toes and lift my mouth toward him. He was lean as the lampposts in the college square—his shadow pointing like the straightest line, mine an assemblage of curves. Zig-zag.
We kissed after dinner and a stroll around campus, there in front of the chapel and across from the dorms—there where anyone at all might have been watching, though I’m not sure anyone was. A weeknight. The students scattered like marbles: away games and study sessions. A Veggie Tales marathon in a rumpus room somewhere. This was a Christian school.
During the kiss: I felt invigorated. Afterwards: triumphant. I had done it! I had joined the club! I was a woman who kissed and was kissed in return!
And though I didn’t know the word then, it seems to me now my first official kiss was really a MacGuffin—the culmination of a quest that turned out to be the commencement of a question. Who did I want to kiss now that kissing was a given of my life?
Once, a woman whose son was “struggling with his sexuality” told me the advice she had given him: “Just find a hot guy and kiss him. It’ll take five seconds, and then you’ll know for sure.” But will he? For sure? And what exactly will he know?
I already liked the idea of kissing, so I knew I would relish the act. Liking seemed foreshadowed, entirely inevitable. And if the kiss was supposed to prove, as my mother said, that I was in fact “a normal, red-blooded, American girl,” well then, mission accomplished!
I was happy kissing Ari. I didn’t have to force myself to do it. Soon, though, I wanted to kiss longer and harder, like a novice student in a chemistry lab—What does this do? What about this? And this?
It was Ari who said we needed “to put on the brakes.” It was Ari who said Jesus wouldn’t approve if we “succumbed to temptation.”
I kissed the first man, the second man, then the third man, who was also, briefly, my fiancé. I grew confident in my kissing, decadent in my kissing. I became one of those people who summits the mountain so she can say she has, but also so she can know she has. Do you really think the climber doesn’t enjoy any aspect of the climb—that it’s all purely grueling, misery from base camp to apogee?
I think most climbers must appreciate the fresh air, the days with clear skies, and especially the campfire stories. After all, the stories they tell on the mountain are stories of climbers like themselves—people who summit mountains just like the one underfoot. In those stories, every character is a mirror for teller and listener alike.
I’ll say it again to dispel any myths: I liked kissing my boyfriends. But remember: I also liked kissing my pillow, and the back of my hand, the washcloths and sponges, any plush toy. Those were the days of glorious, selfish kissing, when my singular mouth aspired to consume the whole world.
It would take a woman—and not just any woman, and not just any "hot" woman either, but a most particular one—for my kisses to transmit a message, to convey a feeling, and to receive these both in return. So many soliloquys in a soundproof room, those first years of kissing! And then at last: a mouth that answered fluently: a dialogue of words and more than words.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 12 collections of poetry and prose, including the book-length lyric essay Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach.
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Cynthia White Santa Cruz, CA
First kiss:
kissed Ricardo Osorio in 1971, my freshman year of high school, on a neighbor's couch in Whittier, California.
Fourteen
Who can even remember?
Whose slumbering child
I was sitting that night,
how many bottles of Boone’s Farm
the boy and I guzzled
before going nose to nose,
our untested lips barely
brushing. The plush nap
of the couch thrilling my neck.
How late did the telephone shrill
its alarm? My mother.
If the boy confided. If I
stayed quiet. So many intimate
particulars I can’t get back.
But didn’t I tear
three buttons from his shirt?
And wasn’t it good? My mouth
all summer an exquisite ache.
Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Narrative, New Letters, and Grist among others. She was a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of The Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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Mary Jane White Waukon, IA
Lindeman
Your last name’s the one I remember. Director
of our all-American chorus, you led me alone
into the sandhills, told me how you were named
for the lindens that grow like smaller oaks
or elms in Europe’s parks, and which, translated
into English, are ‘lime trees’ usually.
You were smaller too; your head and profile
should have crowned a height of six or seven feet.
Lindeman is spicy now I’ve smelled a linden blooming
and been reminded a time or two of you
kissing me, first of anyone. A lime has always been
a green lemon to my mind, but I thought you yellower then,
with age. Now so many have kissed me too.
Still, of them all, you were my good instructor,
the single, high-placed person I hoped to hold
as you would open your arms in preparation for a note
to break from, as I would guess, two hundred girls.
I was your girl, that one day only, at the beach,
where you noticed me out of six or seven. We’d worked
to bury you, helpless to the neck. Dark glasses.
That left your voice and even teeth. Deep breath.
Sand broke off your chest. Alarming. Now I would rhyme
with my early thinking, call it charming.
Then we walked, not far, and sat without a towel.
No waves, no stars, no air to gasp to start with.
Your hand ran under my suit-strap and let it snap.
I thought probably I would hate you, but I have not.
Mary Jane White is a retired trial lawyer who also holds a MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, one in poetry and one in translation. Her Tsvetaeva translations appear along with early original poems in Starry Sky to Starry Sky (Holy Cow! Press 1988) New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke (Adastra Press 2007); Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013). After Russia: Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End and New Year’s (a bilingual text) is forthcoming in 2020 from Adelaide Books (NYC/Lisbon). Contact her at [email protected].
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Patricia Zylius Santa Cruz, CA
First kiss:
I was twelve, in 1959, outside playing hide and seek in a Southern California beach town. His name was John. He squeezed me to him and pressed his lips against mine.
Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Passager, Sequestrum, Juniper, Ellipsis,Natural Bridge, Red Wheelbarrow, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems have also been included in In Plein Air, Women Artists Datebook, and The Yes Book.