what’s unfolding as I kiss a text? as I make contact, actively receiving it in my body?

What kind of animal, what kind of insect, is my kiss? A kiss is something abuzz, alighting, maybe even burrowing.

I am tender toward identities but suspicious of them.

The more one considers making out, the more it seasons, the more it opens up. Just how promiscuous is our reading? As a kind of sex, does it have protected and unprotected forms? Is it any tamer for the reading child?

not quite of me, yet so alive. Why, then, do objects—feathers, of all things—come to my mind? I can’t locate the substance of a kiss, what it’s made of (though I’ll try).

How do words get into us, in order to be words to us?

Some of us, in retrospect, were a linguistic prequel to “trans,” though transgender was happening and being somewhere around us, out of our grasp. We were crafty creatures, but unlike the gender scene now evident, ours felt denuding, maddening, stranding.

A kiss on a text? Such kissing renders a penetration-birth-death-decaying experience? Whatever one’s gendering? Yes, it does.2

Kissing is the ultimate act of estrangement, queer in the stretchy sense of “strange” that many queers prefer to distinctions between straight and gay.