First Kiss: At Eleven
It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple
That makes the boy what he is.
“Aner Clute”
Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology
And it starts, right like most of all the rest
with a drop of what some might call purity
though the truth of it is we can’t see
anything without it be through the milk
of our own…. listen, maybe it begins
innocent a kiss see on the cheek
and maybe suppose it stops there
in the soft hollow between the teeth
and the jawbone and then it’s done
with a touch it’s done with the first three
fingers of your left hand because your right
hand is somewhere else has something else
in mind or that’s what your mother says
when you’re caught with him that you had
your hand on his crotch but really it wasn’t
like that it really wasn’t like that at all
and what started as a warm bird a new
baby two weeks hatched and peeping
(you’d come to see feel hear his lips that way
and for days and days later too) became
under her tongue and tutelage the labor pains
of nothing more than a common slut a dirty
whore a saloon floozie how many Hail Mary’s
after that first kiss did your knees come to know
and confessing it first when the priest, hearing
sighed and sent the judgment down and called
you lost lost lost there’s nothing left now
and he took your hand and laid it on then in
his unzipped pocket and something warm came
up through the dark and he smelled
different than the beautiful boy, old, like going
to the block the day after the slaughters
and it had just begun to rain and the blood
was sticky and as your cheek when he was done
shoving shoving shoving blood of the lamb
down your throat now go, a rosary a meditation
on the sorrows of the Virgin
and you’ll be clean and please tell your mother
to send you back next week with those clean
linens and don’t see that boy again or won’t he
burn in Hell girlie and look now you’ll be the cause
of it.
of it.
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