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| Dreamstime photo |
Actually, the first time
I gave a boy permission to kiss me
we were leaving the beach where we’d
been vacationing for a week. We were
standing in the middle of a street
at the edge of the sea.
It was twilight.
I was about to turn thirteen.
His older brother and my younger
sister and some other friends
and cousins of various ages stood
on the sidewalk, gathered
on the long porch as though
caught off-stage in the wings of a play,
or as an audience, waiting
for some kind of drama to unfold.
But it wasn’t staged. I said, You can
kiss me on the cheek. I knew everyone
was watching. I turned my head
away to offer him the right side
but he spun his head like a devil,
like a rag he twisted my neck
with his hand on my chin and pushed
his ugly lips against my lips, stunned
not into compliance but to
violence as I stepped away and
hit him in the face as hard as I didn’t
know I could or ever had.
I’d transformed before my own eyes,
a defiant spectator pulled into
his ring as he stumbled back
unsuspecting, for some reason
not ready for my response,
that I would take my life back
into my own body, make him sorry
for even trying to make me into
a sport or claim me as a trophy.
If the devil kissed you on the lips
wouldn’t you want that too?
A Best of the Net and Best New Poets (2026) nominee and NJSCA fellow, MaryLisa studied poetry at Stockton University. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have won two Murphywriting awards, a Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship Award, and a Stillwaters Woman’s Words Chapbook competition. She’s had work published by Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mudfish, among others and her poems can be found in several anthologies including most recently Screaming Beyond Borders, a Woman Scream Series.
