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Telling Him I Kissed a Woman
I cut the pill of truth
with honey, promised,
We were drunk.
Said we were egged on
by barstools, wore dresses of gin.
Said I stumbled
onto her face, more so
than an actual kiss.
Spun it as if cameras
were rolling, an image he could beat
off to instead of curse. Said,
It meant nothing.
And how could it?
I was straight
as a wedding aisle.
I touched his beard.
Begged him to stay.
Insisted,
It was only a kiss,
and hoped he wouldn’t hear it
in my voice, how it sounded like,
It was only a decade.
It was only a war.
I didn’t tell him
there was no bar,
no audience
except the magnetic poetry tiles
falling to the floor as she pressed me
against the refrigerator, beaming.
I did not say I felt more in that
one kiss than anytime he thrust
his tongue down my throat,
or wouldn’t get a condom,
or wanted it facedown.
Swore instead,
It will never happen again.
He called me a whore.
I said,
I love you.
He called me a bitch.
I said,
Yes.
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Megan Falley (she/her) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018). In 2019 she co-authored How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (Chronicle Books) with her poet and partner, Andrea Gibson. Falley's chapbook, Bad Girls, Honey (Poems About Lana Del Rey) was the winner of the 2015 Tired Hearts Chapbook Prize. Falley is both a National Poetry Slam and Woman of the World Poetry Slam Finalist and has performed her work on TV One's Verses and Flow and venues and colleges nationwide. In the last two years, since Falley began writing prose, one of her essays was the first place winner of the 2021 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest, and another was the runner-up for Phoebe Journal's 50th Anniversary Nonfiction Prize as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the creator of the online writing course, Poems That Don't Suck, which has been called "a degree's worth of education in five short weeks." Originally from New York, she now resides in Colorado where she is still awed by the mountains.
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Dans le Lit, le Baiser (In Bed, The Kiss). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892.