What If We Kissed in the Smoldering Ruins of America

What if we kissed on the Luigi Mangione dot info website and then sent Luigi a photograph of it “via Shutterfly and FreePrints in accordance with mail procedures while in custody?” What if our kiss was “screened and reviewed by law enforcement?”

What if we kissed in the seventy billion dollar Uncanny Valley High School gymnasium support group for dumped QWOP mannequins?

What if we used an app to summon an armed goon to watch us kiss in front of the A.I. controlled defensive gun emplacements of an enemy burbclave?

What if we smooched under the flaming benzene rain of yet another plane crash?

What if we kissed in the sterile metallic cold of an empty egg cooler?

What if we made out in the desolate silence of a National Forest with no staff left to hear us? Would it make a sound?

What if we kissed beneath the priapic shadow of America’s unattended nuclear arsenal?

What if we kissed in each of the four newly vacant Deputy Mayor offices at New York’s City Hall while Eric Adams stands next to us with a microphone saying something baffling about Adolf Hitler.

What if we kissed in the frictionless glacial Stoicism behind Jude Doyle’s ice shelf?

What if we plastic spooned in the gelatinous depths of the human cranial vault? Or, perhaps not?

What if we canoodled with Politico Playbook editor and sixth grade social studies dropout Jack Blanchard on the FDR Wikipedia page?

What if we followed Caitlin Dewey out to the edges of our media diet and kissed in the perfect moment of singularity where becoming informed transitions into getting on with our lives?

What if we locked lips for the entire three minutes and twenty one seconds of Eve 6’s cover of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” during one of the three upcoming Eve 6 / Titus Andronicus shows?

And after all that, what if we snuck out of our bedrooms late at night and shimmied down the drainpipe at the corner of the front porch, almost slipping but catching ourselves at the last moment on a vine-covered trellis then walking through streetlight-cast shadows under cold pinpricks of starlight to finally meet up at Max Read’s “4,700-word missive on the ‘Zizians,’ the transcontinental Rationalist cult implicated in at least six murders since 2022,” whose leader was just arrested in Maryland?

What if we stood close together there in the humid darkness, not touching but our faces close enough to make out pores on skin even in the gloom, and what if we didn’t kiss, but just looked into each other’s eyes and recognized the spark of humanity in them, equal to our own and equal to the humanity of every other person dead or alive or yet to be born.

What if we did that?