MAYDAY

Kiss
by Cyril Wong

Contributed By:

Couple Kiss
Image by Tiny Tribes from Pixabay

What is new

must also be unexpected

and not what we think

 

is new—

car crash, stalled lift juddering,

 

bed of thumb slit open, blood

the surprise that keeps on giving—

or else there is no freedom

 

from our conditioning:

your body too heavy on mine;

 

your kiss

the same old kiss.

CYRIL WONG is a poet and fictionist in Singapore. He is the founding editor of SOFTBLOW, a poetry web journal.

Filed Under: Poetry

Further Reading

FROM ABROAD by T. R. Hummer

Every night in her childhood, going to sleep, she traveled the paths of the dead. It was easy then to go Where she could not abide in her other consciousness. This was the avenue Caesar the mastiff had wandered. Father said he had run away, and the children nodded solemnly knowing the kind old beast […]

Territory
by Jane Eaton Hamilton

[Editors’ Note: The following story won the This Magazine Fiction Prize and was reprinted in the author’s 2002 short fiction collection, Hunger. It is reprinted with permission here.] My husband’s idea of bliss is to be able to go back to when we first met, when he was a man and I was a woman. We weren’t kids, […]

Crave
by Mateo Lara

Before I carved the binary out of my bone Before I could look at myself and sweet-kiss it when it was easier to hide in the haze of my youth not yet accepting of the bright hot sun on my back in retreat, men evoking rituals on the soft body, reviving little ceremonies of distrust, […]

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