know for a fact, feel for a fact, that slices of this film have lived inside me.

It may look like there’s “a child” before you; a later me; a kisser; a rational reader. Yet for you, I’m words.

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

Gender is always a scene of making out.

The word enters me. The image enters me. From this penetration, there’s immediate birth. The word, for example, births other words (as my mind makes meaning, making out the word), upon which birth there’s partial death or at least decay (words start fading in my brain or disappear, as do many images). All from a kiss?

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.

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?

the “child” is the act of “adults” looking back.