Gardner McFall. Photo by Susan Unterberg.
__________________________________________________________________________________
First Kiss
When Raymond glided by me across the playing field, I chased him
like a jet off radar
to plant the ultimate sting on his cheek: a kiss that burned him
to a blossom of tears.
"What drove you to that?" the teacher inquired, pulling us both aside,
his small shoulders heaving,
my eyes scanning the air for a reason. It sprang from the boys'
chanting, "Girls have cooties."
If I had them, why shouldn't he? After school, Mother's withering
look met me at the door.
She forced me to confess the recess affair to my father,
the squadron commander,
God's right-hand man, my prank now promoted to a top-ranking sin.
Love and sex dove under-
ground, buried deep as my spinster great-aunts, though I recall once
during my college years,
when I came home too late, Mother asked if she should screw a scarlet
bulb in the front-yard lamp—
Did I plan to turn our street into a red-light district?
Raymond, wherever you are, whatever your last name is,
you are the pyre on which I throw each guilt-ridden kiss.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot’s Daughter and Russian Tortoise (poems), an opera libretto entitled Amelia (commissioned by Seattle Opera), and two children’s books. She edited Made with Words, a prose miscellany by May Swenson. She has poems in Norton’s 2018 anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, edited by Laren McClung, with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa. Her 2018 chapbook, On the Line, was published by Finishing Line Press. [“First Kiss,” from Russian Tortoise (2009), is reprinted by permission of the author]
____________________________________________________________________________________
Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss II, 1962.