GYM CONFESSIONS: 3

YOU’RE NOT A GOOD KISSER
April. My elementary school’s playground was mostly made up of a vast, overgrown field, fitted with a broken soccer net, a swingset littered in gaps lacking swings, a slide that deposited students in a heap of wet wood chips, and monkey bars.

In the first grade, I kissed the principal’s son while we hid during a game of hide and seek. He asked me if we should get married, blue eyes peering at me over beige-tipped reeds of grass. I rolled over, belly facing the cloudless sky.

“No.”

A girl in hot pink Sketchers bounded up to us, screaming that we had been found.

I. innocent like worms
bursting through the Earth during
rainstorms, wriggling

to thunder rhythms,
each crack-boom a brand new day:
stay in this moment.

October. During my sophomore year of college, my boyfriend and I spent Halloween watching television and kissing. We used my twin XL as a couch rather than a bed, legs dangling towards the linoleum floor, bare ankles brushing with each small shift of our positions. With our faces illuminated by Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions, my hand coasted the length of his stubbled neck.

At the time, I was undereducated in the art of making out.

As our lips pressed together in lingering pecks, he mumbled, “you’re not a good kisser.”

II. bricks for a backboard
tenderness beneath midnight
skies. inhaling breath

sweet with a beer twang,
narrow fingers curled around
your stiff, starched belt loops.

June. I will soon be a college senior. I’ve become attached to my steering wheel. I hold her tight. Clench a marlboro between my teeth, cancerstick jutting out near the right corner of my lips. Nursing a McDonald’s Coke Zero. Wondering if I’ve burned myself so close to the filter that I have mistaken emotional intimacy for withdrawn obligation. Where has my sensitivity gone?

“Do you like this?” I asked. Yes, you whispered.

“Am I bad at this?” I asked. No, you whispered.

“Do you want me to keep going?” I asked. Yes.

“Do you love me?” …

III. my unsexy sex
appeal screams, reverberates
from the depths, my bones,

weak infrastructure
for my body, a mossy
old mausoleum.