by Brian Turner
When it was over the groom turned to the bride. He was much taller than she, and he leaned down toward her. He put his hands on her shoulders, moving his face close to hers. But the bride shrank away, her body dropping, her head turning to one side, refusing him.
It was a mystery. What was this strange ritual, the approach, withdrawal, public rejection? For a moment they were motionless on the stage, his hands poised over her shoulders, her hands behind her back, face turned utterly away.
Then I became aware of something—movement and sound—that was rippling through the audience. It started in the front and ran softly through the guests in their elegant clothes. It reached all the way to the back to the foreigners in the doorway. It was a ripple of laughter.
The bride had got the giggles. Her body shrank because she couldn’t hold herself sober. Her body had given way to that joyful explosion that laughter makes inside us. As her groom approached, something had taken her over. And that something had taken over the audience. Everyone felt the visceral recognition of this private, intimate eruption. Everyone was giggling quietly, remembering how delight takes over your body. We all gave way, remembering how gravity is only one side of something else, something that can’t be controlled, something that makes us helpless and unrestrained and joyful.
The giggle spread quietly through us, quick and subversive. We were invaded by laughter. Then, like a wave, it smoothed itself out and vanished into the sand. The bride straightened, her face turned serious. The giggle had moved through her. She straightened and looked up at the groom. Her face was now calm and radiant.
Again he leaned toward her, now hesitant, aware that anything could happen, any kind of explosion might pull them apart.
But it did not. He brought his mouth to hers, she lifted her lips, and they kissed. We watched, remembering that, too.
KISS
Honor Moore
A laugh on the landline. I went outside so I could think. I couldn’t think. What do you want to do with me? I want to take you out to dinner. A week before, a party flirt across a room. Stranger, though I knew his name. The April evening goes dark as we don’t eat, but when I spear pale green melon, he puts it in his mouth. We walk, dark, then arms and shock, tongue the ocean and suddenly my mouth was small. A wave that takes you so fast under, it could kill you. We had crossed a street. Gone inside. Not home, not anyone’s home. The whole time standing, as if I were pliable. Your tongue, he said, put it in my mouth. I had forgotten to move and I did what he asked, as if there were a way to eternity or it was important to tell very hot from very cold. That summer, in a sleeper alone on a night train through the Alps, vibration of wheel on rail, all-night shudder as if it were him beneath me, as if we had continued. April. Seventeen years ago, almost to the day.
GENESIS
Christopher Merrill
Don’t stop, she said as he poured from the watering can the keys to houses she had never visited, drawers she could not unlock, cars reserved for others. Then coins from countries that appeared on none of her itineraries—Ukraine and Indonesia and Iran, not to mention Argentina and Brazil. And hoop earrings she would not be caught dead in, glass beads from a necklace worn by someone else, a silver brooch that made her heart ache. Don’t stop, she said when there was nothing left—and so he filled the can with water to sprinkle over the objects spread like seeds on the dining room table. One by one they sprouted into new lines of argument, and as they grew she raised her hands above her head, crying, Don’t stop.
What did they seek in the storeroom, garden, and bedroom? What drew them night after night to a shuttered house on the bluff above the sea, vowing to repair the damage caused by the shifting earth—cracks in the adobe, loosened tiles in the kitchen? Kiss the feet, the hand, the mouth: this was their credo, adapted from a text translated by an adjunct from the valley. Marry word and deed, he told them at the final exam. Weeks passed before they got his little joke, by which time he had taken another job out of state. They didn’t try to find him: there was too much to do. The rains were heavier than usual, uprooted trees slid down the bluff, and while they debated whether to reinforce the foundation the earth gave way in a wall of mud that covered the road, burying an empty tractor trailer and an armored car returning from the casino. They had no title to the house riding out to sea. The one song they knew had something to do with desire.
Oscula—this was the word on the tip of the tongue of the woman who refused to travel farther down the coast without assurances that she could film whatever she liked. The soldiers patrolling the beach were negotiating the terms of their surrender to the insurgents, who had invited her to join them for the march to the capital, and she was surprised by her mixture of emotions at the prospect of peace. The enticements of the sun and sea were parceled out among the families gathered on the shore, the fishermen lining the jetty, and the feverish man pulling a barrel full of monkeys down the boardwalk. He stopped to wipe his brow and saw, riding at anchor in the harbor, a ghost ship laden with medicine and provisions. There was an old man collecting coils of rope in the wrack and rocks below the hotel, which had been attacked on the first day of the war. How it remained open throughout the siege was a mystery to everyone but the manager, who cautioned guests not to leave their satchels under the table, or else they would lose their money. Wiggle your hips, throw something out—it was all the same to him. Diamonds vanished from the market, and no one seemed to mind. The soldiers laid down their weapons and removed their boots, posing for the camera. Kiss me, the woman said, remembering—and they did.
A MOTION OF PLEASURE
J. Mae Barizo
I.
Imagine a small town in Southern Ontario with two rivers running through it. Church spires, cobblestone, Carolinian forest. It is the early eighties and besides the Iroquois children in your school, you are the only girl of color: brown skin, black eyes, bowl cut. The locals think your father is First Nation, they sometimes give him tax-free gas when he fills up the tank of his Soviet-era olive-green Lada, the first car your parents own.
The snow is so bright you have to squint when you walk out into it, a blinding white. Your father gets pneumonia because he grew up on an island in the Pacific; he and your mother emigrated to Canada when you were only a speck on the horizon. You are born in that northern country so your first memories are of snow: your skinny father building an igloo big enough for both of you to sit in. The sky is white, the streets are white, the people are white. The first girl you love, the year you turn four, has white breasts you reach toward, laughing. Only later do you realize it was your mother’s breasts you were thinking of, the mother who worked so hard in your first year of life that you barely saw her; you were relegated to a Filipino granny who fed you from a bottle, your baby lips pursed.
II.
Your first kiss is with a Haitian-Canadian boy from Montreal who has a French name that sounds aristocratic; he is not. He kisses you in a stark white racquetball court in the middle of a game and you drop your racket; the sound of it reverberating through the soundproof room.
III.
The man leaning over you is concentrating on your left breast, the sound of Mozart ribbons through the air. His tongue flutters over your nipple as the rest of your body rises. You clutch his shoulder then slap his face, your teeth on his white skin. Months later you still remember his mouth, approaching and retreating.
IV.
The midwife tells you to think about the sea. A white beach with palm trees; docile, white-tipped waves. “I don’t fucking like the beach!” you tell her through clenched teeth. “Breathe,” she croons. “Where do you want to go, then, let’s go to that place,” she says with her gentle West Indian accent, taking your hand in hers. “A field of snow,” you say as another torrent of pain rips through. Everything goes white.
V.
A wail slices through the air and you come to. “She’s losing blood,” you hear a nurse say, and at once there is a trio of people congregating in front of you, looki
ng between your legs. You are suddenly conscious of tears running down the side of your face, you are inhaling tears as you breathe, your tears are falling into the sides of your mouth, you taste the salt of your own tears. You see a pair of metal shears, severing the cord that has attached her to you. The tiny mouth won’t stop wailing, the tiny fists beat the air—first contact with the outside world. Her body is covered with your blood and then her body is pressed against your body, her mouth clamping onto your breast, a wet animal warmth.
VI.
A mother’s milk, the first inherent ardor.
“Imagine a small town with two rivers running through it,” you tell the child, the whites of her eyes shifting back and forth as her mind moves.
“Her voice was like a line from an old black and white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness,” writes Haruki Murakami.
“I can’t remember kissing someone for such a long time,” you say to him, your mouth on his eyelid.
“A field of snow,” you shout before the pain rips through.
The child’s melon-pink mouth, rooting.
“Everything,” Kant says, “exists only in our mind attended by a motion of pleasure.”
KISS, BOUNCE, GRACE
Steven Church
There is this different kind of kiss I know, one layered with memory and associations, one containing the promise of forgiveness. Like a key to a lock I cannot see. Unique from the others, this kiss lands loud and hard at first and leaves a blue mark. But it always bounces elsewhere. My father used to bring the stains home on the back of his thighs or his lower back, near the kidneys.
He taught me that this kiss is sometimes not planted with lips but by a brief meeting of racquetball and back, sometimes ball and thigh, or ball and eye, gifting you a bluish purple bruise the same size and shape as the ball itself—as if it has left its shadow on your skin, a shadow of a memory.
This is not the part I crave. Not the pain. But maybe the paint, the mark.
It is the kiss of ball to wall that I’m after. It’s the bounce off the concrete to the blur, the breath and noise. You know the kiss is good because of the sound. And here, in the moment, it’s all about the sound and the sensory rush. When you hit the blue ball good with the sweet spot of the racket, there’s a special noise it makes, a kind of hollow pong-whoop, and you know the shot will be hard and fast, and you can almost feel it reverberate in your chest like a bass drum; when you cock the hammer, racket raised over your head, and bring it down hard and fast, transferring all the momentum to your wrist and the racket head, you feel like motherfuckin’ Zeus unleashing lightning bolts from your fist. When you hit it good, the racket transfers all your angst, all those spinning thoughts and self-doubt into the blue ball and sends it slamming into the wall. But when you miss the moves and catch the kiss wrong, the shot falls flat and sends a shock-shiver up your arm like a tuning fork smacked on concrete. It rings your bell a bit and humbles you, confronts you with your failures to follow the bounce.
This kiss still reminds me. This bounce. This is what I try to track.
Imagine, if you will, entering a bright white windowless room, the only entrance a white door, smaller than a normal door, with a tiny fogged-up plastic window. The side walls are rimmed around the bottom with the black scuff marks of sneakers, a cloud of impact that rises up and fades into shadows of blue ball scuff. Black to blue. And back again. It looks like someone has tried desperately to climb the walls. The occasional constellation of cracks in the front wall, combined with decades of chipped paint, create subtle valleys, dips deep enough that they can ricochet the ball off at odd angles and keep you guessing about your worthiness. And this game is all about understanding the angles of bounce. It’s about patience. And forgiveness of your sins of the eye and hand.
In this game, this play, this dance, the ultimate kiss is the kill shot. Rackets are rated according to their kill shot potential. And each shot has its own sound, as significant as its force and speed and location. A kill shot sounds sharp, quick, like gunfire, and then it dies, usually as the ball dribbles out across the floor, impossible to return; and sometimes, if you hit the ball directly into the spot where the wall meets the floor, it makes a kind of hollow pop like a balloon and sputters to stop against a side wall. If you put all your pain into it, a kill shot can save you. And sometimes after a long rally, a rollicking volley of shots, the ball will feel warm to the touch, as if its chemistry is beginning to break down and you think it might melt in your hand. You’ve seen a ball split like a melon rind, too tired of the pounding.
Thus I arrive in my half-awake state, seven a.m. on a Sunday at my local gym. There in that temple of noise, I turn my arm into a whipping noodle with a racket attached, and the blue orb, unleashed, seems to hover and glow, lit from within, as it zips and bounces beneath the early morning light-emitting diode of the racquetball court—the hardwood and concrete church of chipped paint and cracked walls, the holey ceiling and half-ass patch job, piles of paint chips in the corner, shed like scales before your eyes. Sometimes the ball comes back to you dusted with white as it takes part of the wall with each kiss.
I play alone these days. Fifteen minutes to pray before my cardio time. Fifteen minutes of lightning and thunder. And it is an odd kind of meditation for me. A rhythmic trance where my body moves and my mind follows the bounce, leaping from one thought to another, all of them contained within the court, each one coming fast like a blue ball, and all I have to do is send it back hard or let it pass. It’s hard to explain the synesthetic rush of such worship.
The blue ball flies fast, daring you to keep up.
On Sunday mornings when I was a kid, my father used to take us for donuts and drop us off at the church where my mother worked running youth programs. Then he’d drive to his own places of worship, the racquetball courts or a bar called the Sanctuary where he sometimes took us for the all-you-can-eat taco bar after we got home from church. When we asked him why he didn’t come with us to church, he’d say, “I did my time.”
Dad’s religion was a different sort, the kind practiced regularly on racquetball courts, the kind that sent him home some Sundays with those round purple bruises. After the divorce, my brother and I would often go with him after school and lift weights or kill time in the hot tub and sauna while he played a few games with his friends; and I can still recall the loud ruckus of those days as their noisy kisses echoed off the walls and filled the small gym lobby.
When the games were finished we’d all head across the street to the Mexican restaurant where my brother and I would order a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple and my dad and his friends would drink beer and eat chips and salsa and queso dip and they would talk the language of men, a tongue we had yet to master but wanted desperately to learn. I think of my father every time I step onto a racquetball court and can still hear his voice booming off the walls. It’s a kind of reconnection, an intimacy through noise and sense memory—each visit like a trip back home. The ball. The court. The noise. And my father.
Still we bounce, each thought leaving a mark.
This gym is also the poet’s gym, the place near the railroad tracks where you might find the local Fresno poets Chuck Hanzlicek or, before they died, John Vineburg and the Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate Philip Levine. This valley is Levine’s valley in many ways, forever elevated by his love for a misunderstood place, his poetry, and his personality. This gym is his gym, the place I used to jokingly call “Senior Center Point,” this gym with the leaking ceiling that can’t handle the infrequent rains. This gym with its dead-spot wood floors that slope off to the side. This place is now my temple of visceral and sensual escape. This palace of kisses. Racket to ball. Ball to wall. Ball to floor. Bounce. Bounce. This gym and its rhythmic flow of noisy prayer. Everything echoes and reverberates until you are awash in the sound, the slap, the pong; and physics even bends to the glory, and you can watch sound try to catch up with the speed of light as
the ball, hit well, leaps off the wall and the noise of its impact chases a split second behind. Part of you watches this happen and understands this is the way that a metaphor works—the vehicle leaping off the white page, the meaning trailing behind and echoing off the walls.
As far as I know Phil Levine didn’t play racquetball, but he was known as an excellent tennis player, someone who understood the angles and appreciated the bounce, someone who played to win and didn’t take it easy on lesser opponents. His modest house sits surrounded by large eucalyptus and redwood trees, just a mile or so from the gym where I now play and run on the elliptical machine; and he claimed to have written almost all of his books there in that house. His widow, Fran, still lives in the house year-round. I’ve known both of them for years and was once lucky enough to live there while Phil and Franny split time in their Brooklyn apartment. This was after my marriage had crumbled under pressures both inevitable and unpredictable; my kids spent half the week with me and we were all trying to negotiate a new life. Many days I felt like a terrible father and a failure; but Phil and Franny opened their home and welcomed my children and me without judgment. In the mornings, after I dropped the kids off at school, I’d often retreat to the gym for a few games of racquetball with friends. My therapist had suggested that I get some regular exercise as a way to combat the waves of anxiety and depression that seemed to wash over me at times; and I could not deny that I found deep solace in the simple bounce of a blue ball. I found some peace through the noise of racquetball and release through the thunder and lightning. And I’d come home spent, emptied, and sit at Philip Levine’s desk—an old door propped up on a couple of filing cabinets—and I’d write in Phil’s office, surrounded by his books, experiencing a kind of intimacy with genius that comes along rarely in life. Later, for dinner, I’d cook from Fran’s recipe books for my children and imagine that everything would be okay. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Levine house felt like a spiritual place, inhabited by the benevolent ghosts of art and poetry and jazz. Some days I’d flip through Phil’s shelves of classic jazz albums and drop a needle on Bird or Coltrane, Rollins or Blakey, maybe Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. I didn’t write poems in that hallowed house, but I wrote essays, mostly, things like this that ramble and move by digression and association, essays that bounce with associative fervor, because that’s the way my mind moves most naturally—pinging off something small, the idea of a kiss, to something larger like racquetball and religion, recovery, and back to this simple memory: When she greets you, Franny Levine, a small woman with an impossibly bright smile and soft eyes magnified by her glasses, will reach up to you and cup your face in her hands; she’ll hold you there, look you in the eye, never blinking, and kiss you square on the lips or maybe on the side of your face, keeping you in her embrace for a second or two—and this small gesture, this mark, is filled with more kindness and love than most people get in a day or a week or a month. This is no coldly formal European side-kiss. This is something bigger, deeper, the difference between a fountain and a well. She will reach out, bridging the abyss between any two humans, and offer this kiss, this true gift, this brief meeting of spheres, and you’ll feel like a balloon being inflated, and believe quite suddenly in the possibility of grace.