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resent him because I recognize him. This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both. We’re pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go.
We danced American in the room
The truth is, people everywhere need to do more than just eat.
so I’m the only one who can recognize them outside of their broken English, the only one who can restore their manhood to its full height.
The Egyptian catcall is a form of social engagement, an interpellation of womanhood, increasing the potentiality of every public space, so refreshing after Manhattan, where no one looked you in the eye!
They wore no clothes on their skin, had no fat on their muscle, so they seemed doubly naked—
made being outdoors as uncomfortable for me as being indoors was for
a transparency that seemed at times a failure of imagination but at other times a form of respect.
He was just curious, communicating a whim, nothing more. You could see right through to the bottom of him.
She has the deadliest sideburns. Men in Cairo don’t have an appreciation for sideburns. It is a strictly country aesthetic to see them smudge against the ear, so close to the neck.
I insisted because she wanted me to.
She touched me as though petting flowers, and I held her scalp in both hands. Yes, she meant yes, so I gently pushed us both over the lip.
furnished with what she refers to as pieces:
The tables and chairs are all arranged as though for a portrait, at their best angles, with haughty upturned chins and arched foot soles. She leaves the shutters open day
You’d walk in and be confronted immediately with the feeling that all the furniture was living in denial of its geographic circumstance, that the human who had done the arrangements was afraid of the city outside her windows.
We are wizards together: a bald woman and a longhaired man in fantastic dragging clothes.
revolution
Him revolution vs her protest
as if proving his machismo to me, threading pearls around my neck.
This is where Sobhy heard a bullet with his ear—it went in the left and out the right.
That sheepishness, afterward, at having been caught believing.
As long as we are outside, on the streets in this city that he owns, he leverages his knowledge against me. When we come home he is less powerful, less instructive.
We’ve been playing house for the last two weeks. Except that I’m both father and mother,
we make love everywhere.
He asked once if there was a spare key and I said I would make him a copy, but I don’t.
If a fly rubs its hands delightedly all over your excrement, is it a compliment or an offense?
Other times she looks at me with an appetite that is romantic but wrong: Curious, consumptive … anthropological? As
It’s her American showing:
Then I get so wicked I make up things just for her.
But he didn’t leave. He just stood there and looked around, as though he didn’t know what came next, had forgotten his lines.
He is both childishly romantic and a hater of women.
As though he were some snarling puppy
she pushed a string of raw goat meat inside her so her husband could open her again.
The retelling of his story true or his fabrication
is this apartment.
I’m effectively trapped.
She’s never home without me. I’m never out without her.
Double Meaning in his likeness to a house pet and thier domains of power
We do what we have done a dozen times before, delaying hand in hand for as long as we can the decisive moment:
he’s at least as spoiled as he is damaged, I mean.
He senses that his usefulness is depleting.
He is weaponizing all his losses against me, and I am wanting the abuse, or, at the very least, accepting it as mine.
In fact, many of the photographs we prided ourselves on taking for posterity’s sake, as archival testaments to the martyrs and believers, the heroes of our time, ended up being used against them.
could show her my work from 2011 on CNN, but I don’t. Her question is a capitalistic reproach.
watery breasts slipping to the sides of her rib cage like raw eggs, her stomach hollowing to make a bowl. With
Then roughly flipped her over to capture her back because that was what she wanted.
And we are also leaking our private lives out, adding our commotion to that of the neighborhood.
so if anything went too loudly wrong, someone might come knocking.
Would he have thrown a glass at me in any other room?
As she’s leaving in the morning for work, I wave at her from the balcony like a proper housewife, a fresh bride who soaks her skin all day in buffalo milk to soften it for kneading.
My body is not finished with me yet.
When she curls into my chest, I want to wax poetic, unburden myself of every secret, but I know she will not be able to keep up.
You are condescending toward the street dog.
