You could call where we live
a house.
A room, very high up
with a very low ceiling,
one window, quite large,
and one very small door
that you could pass through
with your hands folded over your breast,
never lifting your feet from the floor.
You can look out this window, too,
out the window in the very high room
with the very low ceiling
if you like;
you can sleep without stretching your legs;
you can live never lifting your head.

Zeeshan Sahil was born on December 15, 1961 in Hyderabad, Sindh. He is one of the main poets who started writing prose poetry in Pakistan. During his lifetime he published eight collections of poetry in Urdu. All eight books have been published in a single volume, titled Saari Nazmain, and his ghazals were collected in another volume, Wajh-e Begangi, in 2011. He died on April 12, 2008 in Karachi.

Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Faisal Siddiqui is a director of services, working for a mid-size IT consulting company in Southern California. He has a BA in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His poems have been published in Barrow Street, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Malahat Review, New Letters, Tuesday: An Art Project, and Notre Dame Review.

Christopher Kennedy’s most recent collection of poetry is Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd.). His work has appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, and McSweeney’s. In 2011, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship for Poetry. He is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Mi Ditmar is the Grants Program Coordinator for The Humanities Center at Syracuse University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Award and the Delmore Schwartz Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Stone Canoe, and her fiction has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review and Prairie Schooner.

Editor’s note: “Four Walls” is from Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, copyright “June, 2013” by “Faisal Siddiqui, Christopher Kennedy, and Mi Ditmar” BOA Editions, Ltd.