This performative endorsement of the flesh informed by underground Quare Socialities uses the spaces of resistance to inform freedom. We start from the start point of in the movement and those haptic relations from within to inform the kind of subjectivity that moves beyond- a kind of subjectivity that is disinvested, unalienated, non-exploited and uncommodified

This flesh is not just mine, or yours; it’s ours, we share this flesh and we share in flesh. Coalition happens when we don’t presume that we already know each other. Plagued by myths and exclusions, bodies mired in the hubris of cohesion and normalcy can’t give us what we need. We need something else, which is why we welcome the flesh in all its coalescing unfastening, its fugitive agency and force of assault on those nets of regulation. Feel the flesh, hear the flesh, Ralph Ellison’s lower frequencies when they vibrate beneath lowness.

Putting the flesh to werq, claiming an enthusiasm in the expansive capacity of fleshiness to, as they say, make it happen—where “it” is the illegible edge of liberation’s horizon—is a potent refusal. Werqing, or alternatively werking, comes from Black and queer underground socialities, in the hollowed-out buildings, the midnight subway cars, the clandestine balls. It is an affirmative expressive activity used when a way of living “exceed[s] the commonsense of normative categories of social being,” when we bring it but bring it new and different.2 Werqing, because of its love affair with the expressive, the performative, and the affective, is not about that life—or more accurately, that death—of the biological, the documentational, the checked box; werq always happens in the flesh, a different labor in surplus and potential, of repurposing and reworking. Werq is sutured to flesh like a fresh fade on brushed heads, claiming not the rigidity of the body but this ante-body of flesh that we might call that which refuses the body. It takes us through the bowels of “underworlds and undercommons” where things ain’t like they used to be. Werqing in the flesh gives us over, because we choose to give ourselves and be given, to “the parasubjective and para-identitarian movement of the labor of werqing it.” It’s an ecstatic next-to kind of subjectivity, a to-the- side- with-ourbacks- turned- to kind of identity. We love it here in this flesh, werqing it, getting werqed by it, giving it werq to do.

Werq, then, is in fact the first right: “an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers that 142 | Escape resistance, that differing, call into being.”3 We are different and differently positioned, which demands that we work this thing differently, but in that difference we are working with each other to be with each other on the run. That’s where freedom is at, in the escape with our coconspiratorial escapees. It is the somewhere where summer blooms.

Danez Smith, Black, queer, nonbinary, poz writer and performer, offers flesh space in their poem “summer, somewhere.” Without even uttering the word, which is often the only way flesh can be uttered, Smith gifts us with fleshy poesis: an illegible making on the run. Reading “summer, somewhere” is an impossible task; it is a treatise, a plea, to not be read. To read it is to perform a kind of unreading, where one learns how to dissolve the grammars that construct the gaze and read askance, read the hieroglyphic scripts illegible to the rest. Doing a reading of “summer, somewhere,” too, is an impossible task. But I have tried to write that impossibility here, letting it (mis)guide us into another terrain where, indeed, it is summer in a here that is a somewhere.

There, somewhere, where it’s summer, we are never dead; we are “alive someplace better.”4 Always life. We dig up those who have been buried and await their smiles. Graves are exhumed and the dead, who were never really dead, ask what took us so long, then sing hymns, rap lyrics, beatbox, croon. They see the sun shining while snow falls, “fall[ing] black,” because sun shines even in darkness. Beneath the sky we run as if it were falling, but that’s just how we play. And live. And love. We have “afros like maple crowns,” like I have, though morning bed-head and constant finger detangling is enough to make you think your hair has it out for you on some follicular vendetta-type shit. Still others of us, others who might be “a heaven of brown / girls” are instead “braiding on golden stoops.” Call them cornrows. Call them plaits, as my Grandma prefers. Call them micros or call them twists. But call them beautiful too. Here, somewhere, where it’s summer, is where we choose and say our names. Maybe we call each other ace, G, homie, cuz. Or we “say our own names,” in no need of others deemed more alive to recite them for us, in honor of us. We can do it ourselves because we are not dead; we don’t die. We won’t die. And it is not because we pray—an attempt to call forth absent interlocutors—but because we summon our own shifting shadows, shadows that attest to our presence. We might wander temporarily, for a day, or forever, but we pick our own names, say them, maybe change them, and say them again. There is imaginative epicness there: “O, the imagination of a new reborn boy,” Smith writes. What on (or off or beneath or on the outskirts of) Earth might we have at the ready when we don’t have to succumb to the legible scripts of what they expect? Well, I can only imagine.

Here, in the flesh, where in somewhere it is summer, “there’s no language / for officer or law, no color to call white” because there are no names for chains, no names for capture, no names for violence, no names that we did not fashion for ourselves when we declared that we are still, always, alive. The Law and its minions cannot venture here; here, the summer in somewhere, is just another word for the place where the oppressive force of the Law and all its variegated hues do not dare tread. The only language we have here is one of love, the point of crisis that bursts with and as multiple avenues of shared escape. Somewhere, where we live with flesh, is where we un-be who they said we were (supposed to be). We are not what they said; we are more, so, so much more. Over here, on some real shit, “everybody wanna be black & is.” And I think, I hope, Smith means that. We Black over here, where Black is more than that. You know what I’m talking about. Black is not and is more than that thing we’ve been trained to see; it is, maybe, what we can’t see (yet), maybe what troubles seeing, maybe what can’t be caught in sight. It ain’t got no body, and ain’t got no mind because it’s thoroughly out of its (right) mind. “They” can’t see us here or catch us here unless they’re here with us, at which point they won’t be they anymore but us—together in difference and together to undermine what they were said to have to be too—and 144 | Escape we’ll be reading with hapticality, hearing with ocularity, smelling with gustation. Illegible hieroglyphics that only we can decipher. Like those of ungendering, unracing, unworlding, or Smith’s “unfuneral,” which we sometimes do too. It matters less how you got here and more that you’re here, werqing. We werq over/down/in here, disinvested, unalienated, nonexploited, uncommodified.