Summary
The speaker in this untitled poem recounts a memory of the first boy who kissed her. This boy held her shoulders down like handlebars on a bicycle ridden for the first time. The speaker was five years old at the time of this first kiss.
The speaker describes the boy's scent as the "smell of / starvation on his lips" in the second stanza. This came about because of the way the boy's father feasted on the boy's mother in the very early morning. Either through observation or inheritance, the boy resembles his father in the way he smells of starvation.
In the third stanza, the speaker states that this was the first boy to teach her that her body was meant to be offered to anyone who wanted her to feel less than whole. In the final stanza, the speaker describes feeling as empty as the boy's mother must feel five minutes after her husband "[feasted]" on her sexually and emotionally.
Analysis
This untitled poem appears in "the hurting" (the first section of the book), which includes dark themes of assault and pain. The type of pain expressed in this section and in this particular poem extends beyond physical pain to include the emotional trauma of painful physical experiences. The very first line of the poem (which is referred to as the title in this guide) reads "the first boy that kissed me," which marks it as a significant experience for the speaker. There is hope coiled into this line: here is a young girl experiencing a physical connection with a boy for the first time. But the second line clarifies the type of experience this was. The boy "held" the speaker's shoulders down, which is not a gentle description, but is not yet particularly violent or specific.
The image of the speaker's first kiss is further developed by a simile: the boy held her shoulders down "like the handlebars of / the first bicycle / he ever rode." This comparison dehumanizes the speaker by comparing her to an object that one grips and handles without care. A bicycle is a vehicle propelled by human exertion, which makes it seem as though the boy is using the speaker to travel towards his own pleasure without regard for hers. The speaker states that she was five years old at the time of this incident, but the boy's age is unspecified. The age here matters because it is possible that the boy is too young to be aware of the hurt he is inflicting on the speaker, who remembers the incident from an adult perspective. To the boy and to the speaker at the time of this incident, this kiss may have just seemed like innocent child's play, but it left its imprint on the speaker. The lines in the first stanza get progressively shorter, as if the effort of recounting this memory shrinks the speaker's access to words.
Like all of Kaur's poems, "the first boy that kissed me" is written in free verse with minimal punctuation, all lower case letters, and an uncomplicated style. For this particular poem, this adds a childlike simplicity that juxtaposes the heavy emotional content of the poem. The second stanza begins to develop the darker aspects of the poem. The speaker describes the smell of starvation on the lips of the boy. Like all sensory experiences, smelling involves taking in outside information. Starvation implies a severe lack, so in other words the speaker is consuming the boy's empty and destructive energy.
There actually exists a literal smell of starvation that occurs because the body begins to metabolize fats when there is insufficient glucose. This process is called ketoacidosis. Burning fat releases ketones, which can cause a foul smell. In this situation, the body cannibalizes itself to stay alive. In the poem, the smell of starvation is meant more as a description of the boy's attitude than as a physical phenomena, but this description still evokes the physical.
The speaker states that the boy picked up the smell of starvation from "his father feasting on his mother at 4 a.m." This disturbing image again implies ketoacidosis, but instead of the body cannibalizing itself, here the smell of starvation stems from consuming female bodies. The word "feasting" supports this insinuation, and the fricative alliteration of "father feasting" naturalizes the occurrence of men consuming female bodies (both physically and energetically). The speaker seems to be saying that the boy comes from a lineage of men who interact with women in this way.
The line "his father feasting on his mother at 4 a.m." is the longest in the poem, which implies the speed at which this feasting took place. This line is clearly from the perspective of the older speaker looking back at the situation and making connections or assumptions. In the following stanza, the speaker returns to her own experience, and describes the energetic effect this "feasting" had on her sense of self. She states that this boy taught her a lesson about her body, namely that her body was "for giving to those that wanted / that [she] should feel anything / less than whole." The line breaks add a sense of tension as they progressively reveal information because the poet does not make her point until the final line of the third stanza.
The final line "less than whole" pinpoints the energetic and emotional hemorrhaging occurring as a result of the boy "feasting" on the speaker. The consequence of this "feasting" is the speaker's feeling of emptiness, which is developed in the final stanza through a comparison. The speaker's emptiness is compared to the way that the speaker imagines the boy's mother must feel at 4:25 a.m, twenty-five minutes after the father "[feasted]" on her. The connection the speaker feels with the boy's mother conveys a shared female experience of violence at the hands of men.
