I’m sure that I remember Grandma Mary kissing me on the mouth. It was nothing salacious, just a slightly wet kiss from her grandmotherly mouth, 70 years old, a few years after Grandpa Bill died of a heart attack in the bed in the next room. Now I imagine her mouth as the portal through which the world passed the feathered meat of the trout our neighbor Ray caught, the trout she fried with cornmeal and removed the spine from, whose fine bones measured the length of the fish in centimeters from the tail to brain, before she sprinkled it with lemon juice from a plastic lemon. This was the portal through which she drank the last drops of beer from a can, through which her voice came, a voice I remember like an ancient coin I had seen only once, like the owl flying from a tree in the darkness. I wonder when she kissed her husband last, what it means to kiss someone you love and not know it is the last kiss. And then it was me she was kissing, my own mouth with its baby teeth, my bowl haircut, my tiny ears. I was a child who knew nothing of loss, who didn’t know there could be a last of anything. And then she took out a tissue and wipe the lipstick from my face. Grandma Mary turned away, the portal closed, and I could hear her humming as she walked into the next room.

Joel Long’s book of essays Watershed is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Ocean State Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain, and Water-Stone Review, among others. He lives in Salt Lake City.