wildscape. literary journal

Faithless
by Paul Hostovsky

I don’t like the way you read
and I don’t mean
aloud. I mean you read too fast,
too facilely, too faithlessly.
I mean we both read that book
and loved it—you said you loved it—
but then you moved on to another book,
another voice, while I still had the voice
of that book in my head
and I couldn’t move on. I went back
and lingered in the copyright history,
the blurbs, the epigraph and dedication,
then I reread the first sentence, the first
paragraph, the first page,
and it was like love at first sight a second time
as I dove back into the book we loved,
and I’m loving it still
and reading it again. Don’t talk to me
about the book you’re reading now.
Don’t tell me you’re loving that book.
You don’t know what love is.

about the author // Paul Hostovsky