Sarah Browning is co-director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival and DC Poets Against the War. Author of a first book of poems, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007) and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004), she has received fellowships and prizes from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Creative Communities Initiative, and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She blogs at sarahbrowning.blogspot.com.
Living in Turin, Italy, this year, Sarah's new favorite sweets are giandujotti, creamy chocolate-hazelnut confections, the local specialty.
Kissing Girls
from The Smart Girl Poems
Sarah Browning
Barbara Muldoon won’t let me
unbutton her purple blouse
though we’ve been wild
with drunken kisses for nearly an hour.
She stops my hand and stops it
again. Her mouth tastes of Molson Gold
and mine of another kind of gold, just
now learning to hold the sweet smoke
in my lungs long enough to start loving
my own unwieldy body, the press
of something sweet between my thighs.
Barbara sighs, our tongues touch
again – wrap each other in a new warmth
then withdraw, then touch again.
We are learning how talented the tongue can be.
I want to use its new skill on Barbara’s brown
nipples – I can almost taste them in her beery breath.
But the Grateful Dead is playing quietly through
the walls – Friend of the Devil boy sound
I’d never heard till I came to this strange place –
and I don’t know the rules,
whether I’ll want to keep on kissing girls;
if Barbara will talk to me again;
if I’ll ever learn this world.
That was nice, we agree in the morning.
But let’s not do it again.
