“Why are you crying, mama?”
“I’m sad about some things.”
Come Saturday,
we’ll march and a kind stranger
will give my boy a muffin,
and another hand him a
pinwheel to spin in the breeze.
Come Saturday,
I’ll tell him we are walking
and waving and chanting
to bring children back
to their mommies and daddies.
But today,
“Don’t worry,” he says, “a kiss
will make you feel better.”
His tiny peanut butter and jam-
smeared lips pucker and I laugh
into my tears as he plants a kiss
on my mouth.
My mind catches up to the love on my lips
and my heart plummets again. This kiss
solves nothing systemic, halts no
injustice, alleviates no suffering, only
soothes one mama for one moment
before the enormity of collective loss
pours once more into her body.
Peace! I will stop your worries with a kiss.
Forget your circumlocutions, your
deformed memory. Remember anew
the history of the legislation of kisses,
remember the days, still with us,
when a kiss was an act of resistance.
Remember the strange alchemy of law
that transformed a boy into a crime,
and his Xhosa mother who turned
lovemaking into direct action, who said,
“I don’t accept your apartheid law.
I will kiss whomever I choose.”
Remember Mildred and Richard Loving.
And Jim Obergefell and John Arthur.
Remember, that these pains are of old,
that these new laws are louder,
harsher strains of a familiar tune:
“Kiss only your own kind,
your brown kind or kiss
my ass. Do not cross and kiss
the white women and children
we legalized by raping the
continent and making our own
system of documentation.”
So went the after-battle cry,
for the work was not yet done:
“Keep those fools from kissing
or the jig will be up. Establish
boundaries, call them races, and
punish the transgressors. Make all
kisses stolen kisses and incarcerate
the thieves, lest they rise up
and stop our guns with kisses.”
Don’t worry, he says, remember.
Tell them: the jig is up,
we’ve called your bluff.
Violent resistance is futile.
Tell them: lay down your arms,
a kiss will make you feel better.
Tell them: tear down this wall,
a kiss will make you feel better.
Peace! I will stop your war with a kiss.
Forget your white supremacist myths, your
deformed memory. Remember anew
the history of the legislation of kisses,
remember the days, still with us,
and lift up your mouth in resistance.