Rifat Islam Esha

I didn’t want to finish reading The Emperor of Gladness. This feeling invariably revisits me when I deeply enjoy reading a book, becoming completely attached to the characters through a surrender to the ‘willful suspension of disbelief’. This novel deals with the expansive forms of love, loss, belonging and the impulses that shape the fragile lives of people left at the edges of America.

my eyes can barely take the weight of sleep/ now/ now that you are wording sentences on wars

bits and pieces of her day/ get stuck in her hair/ she carries grief quietly

What moon might mean to you

now i see you in summer the kind  that came, before rain  could  settle us April, the beginning of it -

tears tasted salty when i was little sometimes i would inspect a drop against the light-

the first time i saw a tiger was in someone’s house all tall and lifeless; yet a tiger --