What does a kiss mean in our kind of relationship? A truce of lips? That though we’re both animals, you won’t bite? After necking in the cemetery, I felt scattered as that married couple’s ashes. You read their plaque aloud: TOO BAD, WE HAD FUN. Hope my crumbs and dust wind up feeding a cactus whose fruit becomes your tequila. You’d drink me, and I’d enter your temple: an ever-faithful headache. But I wouldn’t be able to see your Adam’s apple jump when you swallowed. Glug glug. So let’s walk upright awhile, keep paradise at bay, OK? Kiss me again, breathe your little ills and weird fear into me. Erase my name, leave me speechless.

—by Amy Gerstler