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What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?

ADHAM: Let’s not get political.

BEDER: Who’s getting political?