When I give a poetry reading, I usually try to wear something bright. I will wear my sweater featuring kissing penguins or a sundress with hot air balloons on it. I do this not because I want to look like the poet version of Zooey Deschanel, but because people usually approach me afterwards looking like they want to tuck a Zoloft prescription into my hands, and they all ask the same question: “Are you okay?” And I get it. I do. I write about heartbreak and death and proselytize the Gospel of Sadness. That’s why it came as such a surprise to me that paragraphs could be such a vehicle for humor, even joy, for me.
I wrote “Philematophilia” (featured in NAR’s Winter 2016 issue) out of the usual desire—to say something that feels forbidden to me. In this case, instead of that god-awful and ever present sadness, what felt uncomfortable to talk about was my desire to eat my baby. Well, ecstatically kiss, maybe. Or pretend eat. I didn’t know what it was, but it was everywhere, in the phrase “you’re so cute I could gobble you up,” in the raspberries on soft little bellies, in an instinct I didn’t know I had. At first, I admitted it embarrassedly to friends. Then my husband caught me licking our son. And anything that makes me feel that uncomfortable almost always has to become a piece of writing for me.
One discomfort easily led to another—I thought of my first kiss with my husband, my first kiss with my friend (who later refused to be my friend without saying why), of my incomprehensible decision to make my first speech for my public speaking course in college about how to kiss. Shame plus time kind of became humor or nostalgia or both. These incidents no longer embarrassed me; they were now part of the history told through my mouth.
In addition to the past, I also wanted to try and solve something for myself—why that hunger? Why did I see my son’s milky cheeks and feel an overwhelming desire to consume him? Research gave me guesses, but mostly it gave me a new puzzle—why is there all this science on erotic desire and so little on the kiss? The greeting kiss, the subservient kiss, the pleasure kiss, the goodbye kiss, the French, the peck, the make-out marathon? I found studies that suggested touch helped me bond with my son, but nothing confidently or concretely declared why such an appetite might announce itself in me with new motherhood.
I haven’t read the essay aloud yet, though I hope I can wear something gloomy when I do. Or if not gloomy, comfortable. I hope I can forget to consider my wardrobe altogether when I read it someday and hope that the joy and humor are enough to settle the audience, so they will know with confidence I am okay, that my son lives, thrives even. That now he says, “No kisses, Mommy,” and I hold back, as I always do, as I have done since the day he was born.
Traci Brimhall is the author of Saudade (Copper Canyon, forthcoming), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
Christian Blaza is an illustrator based in New Jersey. Christian graduated Montclair State University in May 2015 with a 3.618 GPA. Along with receiving a BFA in Animation/Illustration, he was awarded Excellence in Illustration by the Department of Art & Design for the class of 2015. Interested in editorial, sequential, and fantasy illustrations