First Kiss EMS

First Kiss, by Kim Addonizio, is a poem about a woman kissing an individual for the first time. It isn't the first time the woman has kissed anyone, just the first time she has kissed this one male. The woman is, in fact, already a mother. This is an interesting twist, and also leads to the woman comparing the look of the man to the look of her mother after drinking milk. The woman describes the breastmilk almost the same as a drug, and makes a clear point that the baby was not drinking the milk for substanance, but for please. The baby drinking is described as an act "of satiety, which was nothing like the needing / to be fed". She describes the baby by saying "She could show me how helpless / she was", and then describing the man looking the exact same way. She makes the comparison of the baby sucking on her teet, and the man sucking on her face (although she doesn't use that wording). She uses the comparison lines "when she had let go / of my nipple" for the baby, and "when you / pulled your mouth from mine" for the man.





There seems to be something tragic about the woman in this poem. She seems to be reminiscing about her daughter's infancy, making it sound like she was a while away from that point. It then seems from when the man "leaned back against a chain-link fence, / in front of a burned-out church" Those lines make it seem as though the woman is the burned-out church. She seems to also be at a loss of power, first being helpless to her daughter, and then to this man, and in both scenario's it is because she is stronger than the other and has something they want.