Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) by Mois Benarroch

poems, but you keep the poems from everyone. You are writing them to me, and I grab them in the air. I send you other poems about the girls I didn’t dance with, and our poems dance together, but the two of us don’t.
    Next to the Tefillah in Tetouan, in 1996, there was a prostitute, a very young girl. Did you know that in Biblical Hebrew, prostitute and saint have the same root? Kdosha is saint and Kdesha is prostitute. Everything is already in that ancient and codified book. I saw her as I left the synagogue and then we ate fish with a Jew in the Spanish center, very good fish, of course. He told me he had stopped eating seafood, “we all become more religious with time”, and when I told them I was a writer his wife, suddenly and with pride, said, “One of these days you could win a Nobel prize”, as if the only thing people in the world do is wait for a person from Tetouan to show up. Well maybe the world is waiting, but in Israel no one was waiting for me.
    So I got your e-mail and a new smile. I’m going to Tel Aviv to the sea and I’ll send some sea to you up in heaven, heaven, which in Hebrew is called shamayim, which means “there the waters”. I’ll send you a smile from the maritime sky of Madrid. You are on the way to an interview with Saramago, the mago , the magician. I should read his books, I tell myself, it’s getting to be time. But that time doesn’t come. I can’t decide which translation to read, the Hebrew one, or the English, Spanish, or French, and these are very important decisions, it could take time.
    And I pass the time listening to Serrat, which always means that the trip to Spain is not so far away. ‘Oh, if I could be your coat to walk around with you!’, sings Serrat.
    Yesterday in Tel Aviv I felt you so far away and yet so close, outside the limits of time. You were at the same time both the girl playing on the beach and an old woman yelling into my ear because I could no longer hear anything, and it all seemed normal to me. I was talking to a friend about you and he told me I’m crazy, I’m reckless. He asked me how I can make love to my wife after getting an e-mail from you, and I told him there was no problem. He asked me if I think about you, if you’re present. I told him yes, you are present in everything I do. I also told him that I saw you in my future, I saw us together in the future, living together. I don’t understand how or why that was in my future, but that’s how I saw it.
    And then I tell myself, yes there were others before, you fall in love and you dream about those girls for two months, six, and then what comes from all that is a poem or a character for a novel. But this time, how many times have you said you see it differently, you say that this is indeed different. It surprises you that mutual understanding can be created without looking into each other’s eyes; it’s mutual understanding through words. Isn’t that every poet’s dream?
    To create a world, a relationship, just through words. Where do words touch us? Do they have their own life? No, they are our lives. We live not on land and not under the ozone but on words and under showers of words.
    In the beginning there was the verb.
    Damn he who invented the pronoun.

Daydreaming of you in Mynonbeing
    I t is Friday and he will Follow.
    There are two f’s, frets, friends, no fly, no eye, Friday, the last day of the week, when God created man, the groundlings, the glebeux, as André Chouraqui calls them, the roundlings, the ones who will fill the earthly globe and the cities.
    Today I live in the city, in Mynonbeing, the great city where for centuries everyone has been coming in search of gold. They stay because they don’t find it, or worse, because they find it, which doesn’t make very much sense, because in the city the gold is an illusion, a story the rich tell to fill the void, to believe that finding gold makes sense.
    Today, Friday, I live in the city and am a slave to the city. I