Kathleen Ossip
There’s something dead in the middle of my reading.
But I am alive. Me in my little space reading. Not serious texts, not brilliant, just well- thumbed, meg jo beth, the surprise at the vicarage.
There’s a girl in my room reading. She lies on the floor wedged between the bed and the baseboard heating. She’s eleven. She likes Tudor biographies, fictional ones.
Time bleeds out. I read, I seek magic so that I can become something. Not me, not a person, something else, still in my small place.
A box of salt, a thin-boned philosopher. But I’m neither.
The dead something calls to me. I don’t weep tears. I don’t reason appropriately.
I read poems. I think: We have no need for these so perfectly crafted vessels—no more vases!
After a careful purge, I moved houses with a box of twelve vases. Why?
The eleven-year-old wants to murder them. The instant she learned to read “rose” she lost the rose.
There’s a dead spot
in the middle of me. Me so alive in my little space reading.