Daphne Gottlieb, “mouth-to-mouth,” Kissing Dead Girls
no one would believe it, that a kiss could bring you back to life: dead for so long, still for how long, but that kiss started you breathing again, because of her kiss your lungs ached for the first time in how long, filling with air where there’d only been dust; those lips touched yours and then yours were moving -moving-not in sleep or resistance but in pleasure and your mouth moved and her mouth moved and so much-it must be the kiss-what was your body before this? where were you before? your backbone a colony of electric eels, the stars now hidden inside your hands; your head swarmed with fireflies and all the world you’ve been missing: trees, economic upswings and downturns, wars, the dog’s death last fall, stores in your neighborhood filled and emptied and all this information, last Christmas, tsunami, all this time, how many species extinct, that mouth, how many dead languages still caught between your teeth and now silent, speaking the future in tongues, this kiss, you are awake and it’s been so long, the world is so loud, that tongue is licking the death out of your mouth, sucking the poison out of your bite, your body is screaming and you are nothing but kiss anymore just kiss just kiss and as those lips pull away from you, it’s impossible to know if all this is because of the kiss or because of her, because of him, the kisser or the kiss, you are awake, you are just meat, you want to be cut up, packaged and sold and consumed, ground between molars, that nourishing and wrecked at once, and that mouth is pulling away, that mouth is pulling away and you see her face, you see his face looking at yours, your mouth is a monster, is making history, is making a word, your mouth is your arms pulling that body close to you again, forming the oh, the pucker, the nothing except more.(с)