A Writer Uses A Pen Instead Of

Sometimes When She Is Able To Spend The Night With Him They Are Wakened By The Three Minarets Of The City Beginning Their Prayers Before Dawn. He Walks With Her Through The Indigo Markets That Lie Between South Cairo And Her Home. The Beautiful Songs Of Faith Enter The Air Like Arrows, One Minaret Answering Another, As If Passing On A Rumor Of The Two Of Them As They Walk Through The Cold Morning Air, The Smell Of Charcoal And Hemp Already Making The Air Profound. Sinners In A Holy City.

She Entered The Story Knowing She Would Emerge From It Feeling She Had Been Immersed In The Lives Of Others, In Plots That Stretched Back Twenty Years, Her Body Full Of Sentences And Moments, As If Awaking From Sleep With A Heaviness Caused By Unremembered Dreams.

I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

Before The Real City Could Be Seen It Had To Be Imagined, The Way Rumours And Tall Tales Were A Kind Of Charting.

In The Desert You Celebrate Nothing But Water.