The biological impossibility of our zygosity proved no
deterrent to my sister.

XXOO, she signed our postcards from summer camp (where we were the envy of all sack racers). This valediction was not meant to signify affectionate gestures, vouchers for kisses and hugs that could be cashed in upon our return (she occasionally drew half arrows shooting northeast out of the O's to make this unmistakably clear). It was she on the left and I on the right. To her, I was absence from the start. The space harnessed, circumscribed by Her.

She told me once she'd dreamt boys were small as beetles, and she caught them and put them in killing jars, prodding them with a pencil when they got too lippy, feeding them blades of grass through the holes in the lid when they pleaded for rations.

We performed theater in the summer, on a stage of rickety orange crates covered in burlap. She wrote soliloquies for me that invariably ended: HIM: (spoken plaintively) Y, y me?
She made my circulation quicken, her desperation for sovereign contours.

Her cool fingers against my cheek made me well up uncomfortably with tender feeling, and I'd begin to gulp air. It was as though I'd been knocked on my back and was struggling to recover lost breath. I did not think of her in these moments. It was my mouth I imagined kissing.