READING EMILY DICKINSON

Abhijeet Singh

The general consensus is that she was quiet.

Quiet how.

Swan quiet. Lake quiet. Lonely birthday quiet.

This room is empty,

she said.

We should hug and fill this room with a memory.

& nobody can tell kisses

from blinds. 

She was desperate to draw them both.

After a long walk in the woods,

she said things like

“If you could think of me as a forest,

tell me,

what threatens my leaves?”

Between you and me, there are things in poetry

one must not answer.

Like this poem is quiet. Don’t tell me quiet how.

Abhijeet Singh is a multilingual poet, translator, essayist, playwright, co-founder of Decolonial Dogs, a book club host, full-time voyeur, wishing-to-be cat, and many other things not appropriate for a bio. With a postgraduate degree in literature and films, they’ve undertaken another in Creative Writing with Poetry, an MFA at Manchester Metropolitan University. Their MFA dissertation is a series of poems woven in and out of their beloved city, Lucknow, a place they owe everything to.

After 59 rejections this year, they were published in The Third Space, an anthology of contemporary South Asian poets by Renard Press and Arts Council England. They are currently reading for The Dodge (Ohio) and editing poetry for Iron Horse Literary Review (Texas).

In recent news, they've been commissioned by Cultureword to respond to their heritage project called Hard Pressed, working on the archives of Manchester's independent publishers of marginalized literature. As of November 2024, Abhijeet has been longlisted for the 2025 Toto Awards in Creative Writing (English).