First Kiss/Under Capitalism
When I learned I had power to build
on this market, I took it. The currency
placed on the mouth
of a seventeen-year-old girl is startling
to the girl herself. Child of the 80s, I understood
you don’t get anything for free, baby.
So when the brother of my best friend
reached gently for my right hand and
placed it, delicately, with his left—
the way one might set linens and china
on the table for an important guest
—atop his hard dick
after I’d just helped him fold his family’s laundry,
I saw an opportunity. A wrestler at school,
I knew he would follow me up the stairs
because he liked to practice pinning me.
Already the autumn of my senior year, I was afraid
of what leaving high school with untouched
lips might indicate about my human capital.
Understand, when I pulled my hand away,
to retreat from the den to the upstairs kitchen,
this was not an act of self-preservation
but exhilaration. A private minute.
I told myself I was ready
when he found me, held my waist and walked me
into the family pantry, where he asked me
to suck his dick. Presumably a standard deviation
of the market. I said, I’ve never even been kissed.
He pushed his weight on top of me, my body
knocking the parcels off the pantry shelves.
It was almost over as soon as it began, when he pressed
again, pulling it out, before I had a chance to consider
whether or not it was worth a first kiss. I guess
it was better than nothing, even if I had to haggle for it.
