Bodega | Only Once in Your Life Will You Have a Life-Defining Kiss

Only Once in Your Life Will You Have a Life-Defining Kiss

Life is pink and if you’re lucky, love is red.
I am lucky because I know how to knit

and because smart people worry about astrophysics on my behalf.
To demonstrate spectacular confidence, a comet lands

like a brilliant white egg in the sky.
Reality is a gesture toward space

waiting to be seen by somebody else.
Our eyes may never adjust.

Love, move toward me like a boat of animals.
I want to hear music in an eternal mirror.

At midnight, when the rabbit’s foot
twitches three times in sleep,

you will find your lover
in a flower made of fields.

Only once in your life
will you have a life-defining kiss

but may the others be just as good.
If you stay up late talking about desire,

you will wake under an open window
holding fistfuls of silver thread.

Rebecca Pinwei Tseng is a Taiwanese American poet and librarian-in-training at Rutgers University where she is the recipient of the Beverly E. Schoen Research Fellowship. Rebecca holds an MFA from Columbia University, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Chrysanthemum Taiwanese Poets Anthology, Honey Literary, and others. Her work received the Andrea Goff Memorial Prize for Poetry, was a semifinalist for the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2025 Wisconsin Poetry Series.

150 – August 2025

By Rebecca Pinwei Tseng

Only Once in Your Life Will You Have a Life-Defining Kiss