The Archipelago of Kisses Jeffrey McDaniel

for Sarah Koskoff and Todd Louiso

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy—like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss. The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. Now if you were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s ruby door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love? If you rub two glances together, you get a smile; rub two smiles, you get a spark; rub two sparks together and you have a kiss. Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over to your house and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whisky. It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye, and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must nurture the kiss. Dim the lights, notice how it illuminates the room. Clutch it to your chest, wonder if the sand inside every hourglass comes from a special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow, then look up the first recorded French kiss in history: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1300 B.C. But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the earth like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

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More Jeffrey McDaniel: + The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy + The Quiet World

More kissing: + I Know Someone, Mary Oliver + To the Couple Lingering on the Doorstep, Deborah Landau

I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again