If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

Addicts, like grandchildren, do not fill their hours. They pull the hours apart, entertain themselves by melting the hours into new shapes: a ring, a gray braid down a bare back. Occasionally the hours fight back with passion so the addicts

The nostrils are the two holes of the nose, and the word nose suggests both curiosity and snobbiness, and what is meant by snobby is the rice remaining on a plate at the end of a meal, and what is meant by plate is one of a pair of kidneys (usually the right) in the body of a woman.

Even my inner monologue is actively recovering its reach, catching flittering, long-forgotten classical couplets, country saws, profanity. Living

closed all the shutters and watched eight seasons straight of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

Ok so we r looking bac

boy from Shobrakheit’s name, to spare me the embarrassment. I almost say, Who? but stop myself.

Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

Only on a map, I laugh, but the women are round in all the right places.

have been that other girl: weak, self-effacing—an obvious American in her fat-tongued, blubbering Arabic, and punished for it. But not anymore.

English that they write about it, grieve and forgive, fuck their equals.

Emmmm

Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.

night I went up to her apartment and saw how much space there was, how high the ceilings, I have not been back to my shack on the rooftop.

What I saw: flies on the fruit, a beggar on the ground with her abaya pulled back to showcase her club feet. What did the boy from Shobrakheit notice when he walked down Mahmoud Bassiouny? What

I discovered the laptop I had thought was gone, pushed neatly into a corner, under the bed. I hadn’t put it there, but neither had it been stolen. Why did I think it had been stolen?

Does the fact that I noticed his behavior around my wallet and remember it now with cinematic lucidity imply an underlying suspicion? Was I watching him from the corner of my eye for signs of theft or envy?

Did he put the laptop under the bed in order to show it to me? Where and why have my mother’s pearls gone?

back when she was a sophomore and he was her rowing coach at George Washington.

Because I wanted to win by appearing to have lost, because queerness is a spectrum, and no one can say I’m not.

An assault, then. Petty or sexual? Definitely sexual.

How do you explain desirability politics to your whitewashed immigrant mother as she suffers through a mid-life divorce? I didn’t even try. Now,

How much vanity does it take to be a healer? Answer: an astrological amount.

My grandmother spoiled me by giving me a pride beyond my means. She raised me to believe that wherever I went I would be recognized, I would be rewarded, celebrated,

and only now do I see. It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.

I’m no drumstick, but if you wanted an ethnic experience, I’m Egyptian, too, born and bred. My grandfather is even from Aswan—tell her, Sami, she yelled,

You can be molested by a stranger in public and then get up, go home, and make tea, remembering how many sugars everyone takes and to save the tea bags as food for the houseplants, putting them on an upturned jar lid by the sink, because one use is not enough in America.

What are the chances I should be here at the very moment my phone remembers Magdy and chooses his number from any number of numbers, and that I should have just enough money in my pocket when it does?