Kiss. Baptism.
The night fills with charged chatter
from the bar we exited. I ask if I can kiss her
and wonder what door this will open.
Soon, she’ll be gone for two weeks,
and I’ll ride my bike out to a bench
close to a canal where the crows eat the fallen
left-over fruit from the orchards.
They’ve been cleared to build new doors
over the rotting roots. Each day she’s gone,
I chain smoke to ease nerves and call her,
already out of breath. Her voice, an elixir I savor
like the small and sudden bursts of a breeze
cooling my forehead; baptism is a doorway for faith.
It’s been hard to believe in love again,
but faith is at the center of every request.
She answered by kissing me, unlocking
all the terror stored in these clouds of flesh.
But I remembered how easily and quickly
the mind travels vast distances to find meaning
in the strange and striking shapes of our lives.
I felt her sweat on my lips. Baptism.
Copyright © 2026 by David Campos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 13, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Fifteen years ago, I studied the Sufi poets and Sufism. I admired their resistance as they wrote [in code] about what they deeply believed in. [The] code [was] so successful that their works continue to be confused as ‘love’ poems instead of [seeing] their original intent. Since then, my mind has consistently linked the two ideas: love and faith. When I searched for them after having lost them both, I remembered this more recent moment and the question I had asked outside of a bar. To believe again simply meant being able to ask the question because the question signaled belief.”
—David Campos
David Campos
