First Kiss Her mouth fell into my mouth like a summer snow, like a 5th season, like a fresh Eden, like Eden when Eve made God whimper with the liquid tilt of her hips— her kiss hurt like that— I mean, it was as if she’d mixed the sweat of an angel with the taste of a tangerine, I swear. My mouth had been a helmet forever greased with secrets, my mouth a dead-end street a little bit lit by teeth—my heart, a clam slammed shut at the bottom of a dark, but her mouth pulled up like a baby-blue Cadillac packed with canaries driven by a toucan—I swear those lips said bright wings when we kissed, wild and precise—as if she were teaching a seahorse to speak— her mouth so careful, chumming the first vowel from my throat until my brain was a piano banged loud, hammered like that— it was like, I swear her tongue was Saturn’s 7th moon— hot like that, hot and cold and circling, circling, turning me into a glad planet— sun on one side, night pouring her slow hand over the other: one fire flying the kite of another. Her kiss, I swear—if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist. That’d be it, but even sweeter— like a riot of peg-legged priests on pogo-sticks, up and up, this way and this, not falling but on and on like that, badly behaved but holy—I swear! That kiss: both lips utterly committed to the world like a Peace Corps, like a free store, forever and always a new city—no locks, no walls, just doors—like that, I swear, like that.