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62 Body Language In a dream my friend who’s drawn to elegance, wears a white cotton tank top, not her usual silk and lace. Her body has been tattooed, not in dragons or fireflies but fancy fonts in basic black, fonts with more flourish than Lucida Calligraphy—but nothing so garish as ALGERIAN or obvious as Blackadder. I see the word Poetry, the Palace Script of a Pswanning around her arm as if the artist were listening to Tchaikovsky while inking her flesh, and it reminds me of the young Asian girl whose father, a calligrapher, wrote the story of creation on her face each year for her birthday. When she grew older, she could only fall in love with a man who wanted her to write on his body, and he on hers. They scrawled love poems in Arabic: I pass by these walls, the walls of Layla / And I kiss this wall and that wall . . . It’s been said that we are all the characters in our dreams— the graffiti artist, the calligrapher, the girl who knows nothing is indelible except for what’s written on the heart. 63 I am the one who scribbles promises with eyebrow pencil on my lover’s skin, the heat of our bodies melting the tip faster than I can write. ...

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