Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor in the basement of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought: That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy: concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down. Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown? Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her, Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry— you walk ahead of me. You be the mother. And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says, hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water. This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress, with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone. One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk. Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.