Avidly Reads Making Out

Gender is always a scene of making out.

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.

Those of us said to be “girl” or “boy,” without any way to ditch our one word and get the other word, were impaled upon both while falling between them.

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

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?

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?

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

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