toilet

where the stall door bottoms

~ i wrote ~

I found the real community-of-party design genius in the bathroom, where the stall door bottoms stop a good six or nine inches above the toilet seat, such that I imagine anyone with the inclination could get a good look at the user’s netherparts — the face is what’s kept private — which is not so excellent an arrangement for an uneasy American who has come alone and dressed all wrong (yoga clothes?? Backpacking I may be, but in hindsight it was the worst possible solution I could’ve settled on with the tools at my disposal) and is sweating at the ever-growing prospect that she will have to spend the night dancing sober with the cello-wrapped cardboard cartridge she fashioned to smuggle in a joint and some scraps of psychedelica lodged in her vagina because she cannot get it out and, without the aid of its contents, won’t have the disposition to solicit a stranger in this sort-of sex club for help.

It’s a fine length for taking drugs in a group in a standing position, though, and after I got the thing out and made some friends I partook of a few additional substances in a few additional stalls with a hardbodied oncologist wearing perfect Aryan features whom I later enjoyed watching in some kind of heated and highly homoerotic exchange with the Persian radiologist who’d initially drafted me into their circle, and later still after that, when Omar came to me and said, Dieter say maybe you like to go for threesome with us, I said, Why, yes, maybe I would. Because I mean, wow, that’s the dream. Hot boys who want to make out with each other and let me watch AND do stuff with me? Ja, bitte schön, und danke.

But it turned out that Dieter doesn’t actually like Omar that much, and that Omar is more like some sort of blowhard, a talker of big game, and in the cab ride — they ridiculed my wanting to walk — This isn’t New York, they said — they arrived, beyond my linguistic ken, at some agreement that, actually, Omar had to work in a few hours and would be bailing, and Dieter and I would be on our own. Regarding which I thought, Thank the gods, for going home with a man met on a night out has almost never gone well for me — they don’t understand! How rarely they understand — and this promised, actually, to be exactly that times two. And the titillating closeness of their bodies and faces as they smiled and argued in a hazy, throbbing toilet was a far cognitive cry from the 6 am silence and brilliance of Germany in June, and how on earth could I have found my way from the other back to the one?

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emptied the ashtray

A man just sat down near me outside this cafe where I am having twitchy post-club afternoon frūstūck and emptied the ashtray on his table into the ashtray on the table between us
It makes me think of people who have to flush a toilet before they can use it
Does it matter if your own waste falls upon the waste of others

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and I said tagine

~ i wrote ~

Hi. I’m in the Sahara. Helping these Berber guys install toilets in the new toilets tent because the existing one got buried in sand. There is sand everywhere. It’s in my shoes and my socks and my bed and my hair and my teeth and building up behind my eyeballs. They don’t even fight it. Everyone just goes around barefoot except when the sand is too hot to touch, which is approximately between ten AM and six PM. Around midnight or one AM last night, when it had finally cooled off, we took a mattress up into one of the dunes to not bother the tourists who were sleeping outside and lay in the sand and smoked shisha and looked at the stars. Today for lunch we had a tagine because Aziz asked me if I wanted tagine or something I couldn’t understand and I said tagine. He says tomorrow I will be the one to make it, Inshallah. Everything is going pretty well given that these guys speak no English and I, no Arabic and no Berber; we’re getting by in French even though theirs is even worse than mine. Now I have to go because Souleymane has the hookah up and running. Sorry you’re not here. I love you,

Your sister

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