The charcoal lines of her wide hips hiking
up to meet my blackened fingertips; at a distance
I was certain she would sit with me, and watch
my sketchbook fill with dim figures
as sunset gave way to dusk and stars.
The sand beneath our feet was still and still
it spread inside hollows of my paper’s
heavy tooth; texture held her blurry frame
as she inhaled my hand-rolled hash and exhaled
the Milky Way; her reason and her judgment
wage war against passion and appetite.
My hand held on to her
words, incessantly inserting letters—
where her hair should be an Arabic ح
wraps around her square ث face and س breasts
her long أ legs; her body belongs
to calligraphy; lingering silence
between each mid-August meteoroid
alight on earth’s cold edge of endless space.
I handed her my cigarette before
she took it to her sunburned lips, and let
the smoke return to her a sense of sin;
the desert inside her.