Waiting for her under the wall of a cemetery, he was imagining what organ he would use first— his eyes, his hand, his lips, or whatever? REALLY, she was an unknown reality to him. Will this date bring w/ it brand new experiences< different? Ominous sounds began to come out of the exquisite corpses of the well-known lovers.—Germs of the grand voice. {That’s to say, the serenade.}Waiting really sucked, but he didn’t care. He fell into the realm of her hack eyes at first glance. <The astounding glitter through the screen.> He closed his eyes out of perplexity, & questions began to ooze. How can he handle someone alienated from reality? When in the presence of her how can he handle the storms? What if the dust of the cemetery gonna fill in her eyes? What if the sparkle gonna go? This date looked like a wet bog. It can make one easily fall. Not a single detail of hers was forgotten? But, why this perplexity? In situ, she was adorned w/ jasmine. Climax, hungry snakes, anxiety after anxiety. The Youtubeuse became a woman/mirage simulation. Now, she is just une femme absente. Just whiteness in the air. <Angoisse.> <A white shroud.> There is only one thing< both reality and virtuality suck. But aren’t we the real who create these virtual icons? Cursing YouTube, he kept whispering just loud enough, while his hallucinations didn’t dissolve like a bulldozer’s moldboard in a cul-de-sac.

Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia, where he teaches English. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals worldwide. He authored four poetry chapbooks including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014). He also authored a fiction book titled Green Cemetery (Moment Publications, 2014) which is in fact the first Tunisian flash fiction collection originally written & published in the English language. Some of his poems have been translated into German, Greek, Turkish and Italian. You can see more of his work at aliznaidi.blogspot.com and you can follow him on Twitter @AliZnaidi.