This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burn by Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Good Kissing
After Jorie Graham’s “Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt”
The moon, the river bleeding out its glamour
and spume—I wanted to marry it all.
Mosquitoes circling nests of eggs,
dragonflies feasting from dusk-blurred water.
Why did no one teach me that behind
every miracle is a god taking everything
it wants? I'd trace my finger over
the picture book drawing of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil,
savor the stories of women. Proverbs—
Eve, the apple luscious as her sin. Genesis—
Lot's wife's a salt goddess, her body
no Sodom, torched. Salome. Delilah.
Potiphar's wife. Jezebel. But when Robert,
my aunt's boyfriend, bomber jacket
hugging his biceps, edged my aunt against
the sink as she sliced tomatoes,
kissed her with an open mouth? I'd never seen
a man touch a woman like that—
his throat flushed, her bleached Farrah
Fawcett cut catching in his mouth.
She gasped, laughed, begged him to stop.
Because I believed he was killing her,
I ran at him, fisted raised. A humid afternoon
in Georgia, 1989. Even now, I want
to erase Robert's hands from her body—
his touch proving I was stupid to love's hunger.
Good kissing, my aunt said, is what a man
and woman do to make a baby.
Weeks later, she's pregnant when they go
to dinner, hostess seating them in their favorite
booth. The walls a montage of Elvis EPs—
"Love Me Tender," "Viva Las Vegas."
Photos of the King sealed under
lacquer, the table's scratched history.
For women in my family, every
miracle begins with a man, an origin story.
When she told him, he threw down
twenties, walked straight into the night.
No longer body but shadow of court
hearings, custody payments,
he was the hole her daughter
would learn to call father.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
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