Unknown these months, his kiss: I must rely on the memory of our lips like a V
where two strokes merge in a swift wedge of love. Fruit-flavored Chapstick wax
yielding to juicier tongues which flutter and flicker like succulent riffs of jazz.
Although the avoidance seems extreme, I go along. This is, after all, an area to swab—
caution cannot be cast aside at this point (and—besides—other body parts are                                        allowed).
Except how long will this kissing ban last? I find it all a bit freaky, aloof
gay men who will engage in kinky sex but insist on no kissing. Outlandish,
isn’t it? Like dismissing both Bon Jovi and Springsteen when you’re from NJ.
Keepsakes can be recollections, correct? So I keep his kiss like a confidential
memo sealed in the vault of imagination, waiting out Covid. If I could only hasten
opening, part his nearby lips with my own, but I am willing to linger, to sip
quietly from memory, to quarantine kisses to make them more bubbly, richer,
storing them in a stronghold of safety till we can once more take them to the limit.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Bearing the Mask, and 22 Poems and a Prayer for El Paso. Poems have appeared recently in Gyroscope Review, Impossible Archetype, Shot Glass Journal, Raven Review, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. His website is http://swig.tripod.com