International Kissing Day
Celebrating International Kissing Day with romantic poems by John Davis, Clarinda Harriss and Terry S. Johnson.
TRANSCRIPT
Sigmund Freud described a kiss as the “sexual use of the mucous membranes of the lips and mouth.” Despite that turnoff of a definition, someone decided that July 6 should be International Kissing Day. And it has been for about 25 years now.
Last year I wanted to do a podcast that commemorated International Kissing Day, but I couldn’t find enough pieces from Passager about kissing. Recently, I mentioned the problem to a few Passager staffers, and assistant editor—and soon to become editor-in-chief—and is it any wonder!—Rosanne Singer came up with some! So here we go.
Several years after his divorce, John Davis reentered the dating world. He said, “As I grew closer to a certain woman, I knew our romance had approached the kissing stage. After a long time of not kissing, did I still have it in me? Would we bump heads? The fears were nearly as strong as when I was 13.” Here’s John’s poem “You Slide Your Wishes Into Your Lips.”
When you haven’t kissed anyone in three years,
you wonder what will happen when you lean in.
Will your lips panic or slide a bumpy slide
against her lips, a cross country ski glide
that goes awry? What if you slide off, do a face plant?
It’s a full yard sale on the couch with bumped
heads that bruise. You fetch two ice packs. This
is not the cushy cuddle you had planned. These
are not the moans of lust but the groans
and throbs of knocking headaches. You stare
at her and wonder if love is this tough. Ice has
burned a brain freeze into your scalp. You expect
lightning bolts to scar your skin and romance
to be permanent agony like the eagle pecking
Prometheus. But now on the couch
after peach pie and cinnamon spice, you notice
the cut hydrangeas give off an amber glow
as smooth as her skin. You touch her knee.
May I kiss you?
From Passager’s 2021 Poetry Contest Issue, John Davis’s “You Slide Your Wishes Into Your Lips.”
Here’s another dating poem, this one by Clarinda Harriss from Passager Issue 77, the 2024 Poetry Contest Issue. “Advice from Conjure Mabel.”
Q. He came on like Dylan Thomas
only more height and less paunch
and of course not dead but spreading
poems thick as Irish cream
all over me and the whole room.
So of course I took him home. Imagine
my shock. Turned out he didn’t
drink a drop of booze hung
his clothes on hangers made love
as if he’d known my every fold
and crease his whole life long.
Didn’t seem to mind when I untwined
his arms and legs to answer the phone
a few times. Get this: rose
at six insisting he wrote best
before noon. Kissed me and went home!
What can you do with such a man?
A. Put an old desk in the back room
where the east window looks out on
a birch tree pink in the rising sun
and lead him there with a kiss at dawn
next time he comes. If he comes.
Clarinda Harriss’s poem “Advice from Conjure Mabel.” Clarinda said, “Conjure Mabel is my longtime dybbuk. She has been known to dictate a poem to me verbatim. She comes around to re-green my poem-brain during dry spells.”
We’ll end our celebration of International Kissing Day with a bittersweet poem about saying goodbye. Terry S. Johnson’s “Late Winter, Early Spring.”
I’m keeping a window open, hoping the crisp
evening air will cleanse our home ‒ phantom whiffs
of leftover stews, sour sweaters, sad conversations.
Birds are returning or perhaps they’ve never left.
I’m only now hearing their celebrations, their laments.
I notice the huge oaks, their budding branches
rise like hands in supplication. Their coarse bark
brushed in bright rose from the sunset’s reflection.
I’m ready for spring as my beloved prepares
for dying, and so I am preparing, too.
We can’t believe we’re at the end of our cycle,
our last season together. We’re turning a bit
cranky, sniping for the first time. It is not
beautiful, not forsythia blooming, but we understand.
Why does it take impending
death to teach the final lesson?
Our life together has been a feast.
One of us will live on in famine.
He’s finished his shower. In swoon of aftershave,
I kiss his smooth face, revel in his flesh.
From Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest Issue, Terry S. Johnson’s “Late Winter, Early Spring.”
Terry said, “While my beloved began fading away due to end stage kidney failure, I tried to “practice” grief through writing which is, of course, impossible. You have to live it.”
After discussing all the various kinds of kisses, from greetings to betrayals to romance and more, an article in the British newspaper The Guardian concludes with this sentence: “No wonder a friend of mine insists that those delicious Italian confections named after kisses) are really chocolate orgasms.”
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For Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
