After Kardshians season 6, episode 15: “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding” His hair is long, struggles limply in the small picture, but the name I remember. Hard to forget this first kiss—eleven years old, with tongue—to forget how he pushed me hard against the bricks of his house still covered with raindrops, the grass—unmowed for weeks in fall rains—covered with raindrops. He kissed me hard. His tongue hard. His hand hard as it pressed and pressed hard between my legs. I didn’t feel any of it. He’s in a wheelchair now. You’re wrong—I don’t tell you this because it is just or judgement—it is simply so. I’d rather have held the rain close, close as the drops I’d watched run down the blades as if paused on my brother’s VCR, held how, after, my sweater pilled in the small space where my upper back pressed hard into brick. Seeing him like this should have made me feel. But nothing is as good as it looks on the screen: hotel room towels, cheeseburgers, politicians. Not even kisses.
Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte and is a Lecturer for the Women’s Studies Program at Pittsburg State University and the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University. She has been a finalist for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Moon City Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, Nimrod International Journal, Sinister Wisdom, and Josephine Quarterly. Her chapbook A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press), part of the Robin Becker Series, is forthcoming in 2019. Another chapbook Letters to Joan (Lithic Press) is also forthcoming in 2019. She lives in Missouri with her wife and three children where she co-organizes the Downtown Poetry reading series and is Editor-in-Chief of Harbor Review.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s microchap prize is named in her honor.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 
I appreciate how this poem gives me both a roadmap to examine this experience through the poet’s eyes, and yet also invites me to process later on my own.
The rain almost acts like a buffer of protection in the way it distracts and enables one to handle this innocence robing act.
I also liked how you used time to develop the story to a point in the future where it feels to me as though the poet is also still processing but in her way, not in how another or society might tell her she should feel.
And there is irony in the line “Seeing him like this should have made me feel”– because it fills me up to the brim with “feeling”, after reading this piece.
The title works incredibly well with this poem too.