I promise you sometimes kisses
aren’t the electric-toe curling trysts
of mouths movies or books will have
you believe, sometimes they are minty-
coffee flavoured punctuation marks
between laboured breaths that describe
the mundanity of his day, sometimes they
are unspoken good nights and good byes
and I-love-you’s for days him and I don’t
have the courage to say those words. There
are times when our kisses don’t feel like
kisses, on those days we cherish them most.
And I wish I could explain the anatomy of a
kiss, peel it apart layer after layer and tell
you what even the smallest particles did
when our lips met, but I simply can not.
Sure, it is just the simple touching of our
lips but it isn’t limited to pink intimacy, it
isn’t just bacteria and saliva and urgency
and grabbing hair and the need to
hopefully melt yourself into your partner,
that maybe if you kissed hard enough,
you’d become a single body. It is more than
that, it’s the reminder of that one song you
kept listening to when you were fifteen,
when you hadn’t even known the person
who sat right next to you, but for reasons
unstated this song pops into your head the
moment your lips touch their’s and so does
every heartbreak, every drop of rain you
felt on your scalp when you scraped your
knee when you were ten, and the fragrance
of those ripe mangoes that engulfed your
childhood home. A reminder of who you
were before them, a glimpse into
who you might be after.
I wish I could
explain the anatomy of a kiss, at least then
I’d write this poem better.
By Harleen Osahan
Artwork – Erwin Rudolf Weiss, The Kiss, 1898