requiem for a gone girl | Kelsey Smoot | Poetry Contest 2nd Place Winner - Fall 2024

I’ve kissed at least one dead girl that I know of. I look back and realize she was maybe only barely alive when we kissed. Tawny girl, whose limbs I heard crumpled inward towards the end. The one-time teen dream queen who introduced the Gretchen’s to x pills and tongue-tying cherry stems. I thought she didn’t like me at first, which made me work harder to impress her. Then, I acted like I didn’t like her at all, and that was the golden ticket. Back then, I didn’t realize how my Blackness towered statuesque between me and the White kids. One told me his dad knew exactly where my family lived in our seemingly infinite grid of houses, all more or less the same. Still, he knew exactly. Anyway me and the then-alive girl kissed in her bathroom. And when she didn’t text me back that night, I felt like a sad dog, the memory of the kiss a milk bone that had toppled behind the toilet. Back then, kisses felt like gold stars, or the Jolly Ranchers my 5th-grade teacher would tuck into my jacket pocket. For being so smart, she’d said, the candy preheated by the warmth of her folded palm. I never knew whether “for a Black girl” was implied. Anyways, back to the other girl, the only girl, really—the one who died. I remember her kisses were soft staccato, the kind a mother puts on a crying toddler’s forehead. And I’m sure that I responded, wound up as I was, with wet eager smooches. I never saw her again after that day. She died before twenty-five. But I got the sense, I wouldn’t have seen her again, even if she’d survived that suburban listlessness. I wasn’t her type, truly. Fumbling-bumbling teenaged juggernaut, tongue-tied and sweet like a cherry. Too clean. Too pristine. Too alive.

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Kelsey L. Smoot (They/Them/He/Him) is a full-time PhD student in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities. They are also a poet, advocate, and frequent writer of critical analysis. Kelsey's debut chapbook, we was bois together, is forthcoming with CLASH! an Imprint of Mouthfeel Press.