Kiss me

like your back kissed the concrete
the night the ladder slipped
while you were breaking into your house.
As your body floated away
from the eaves, you noted the abundance
of leaf-muck near the downspout, the moss,
before the earth called you down. Kiss me
like the dove kissed the bedroom window
as she passed through. Lie down with me
beside her on my grandmother’s quilt,
glittering like stars, with glass
and blood-mist. Kiss me
back into a girl with redwood splinters in her feet.
Kiss them up through the skin
like the lips of a fish, breaking the surface
of a pond, in its final weeks
before the earth calls it down. And I will kiss you
like the last click of ice, locking the pond for winter.

Carrie Moniz is a poet, Deadhead, nature lover, and teacher. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Superstition Review, Third Wednesday, Read America(s): An Anthology, and elsewhere. She loves dogs and hummingbirds, and is San Francisco-adjacent.