Kara Olson Kara Olson's (she/her) poems have appeared in Water~Stone Review and TAYO Literary Magazine. Her poem 'Last Night' was selected by Donika Kelly as the winner of The Sewanee Review's 2020 Poetry Contest. She lives in Minneapolis.
What Kissing is For In the beginning, there was kissing behind a closed door. At kitchen sinks, women whispered to one another you’re beautiful. When no one was looking, fingers ran along the backs of necks. There was kissing for not holding hands in front of the others, kissing for what two bodies could make as one shadow, kissing for the long fire of causation and cure that raged in the hallway. And because none ran toward the fire, there was all manner of whisper. Your kind of women were a kind of whisper. Those who died behind the door and went to heaven were a kind of whisper. Any woman behind the door kissed both the living and the dead. Women of the past, discredited or dead, shared secrets. The living travelled to places their bodies had never been. Knees touched beneath tables.
19
