Kathleen Ossip's poetry has recently appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Journal,
Barrow Street, The Antioch Review and The Paris Review. She teaches poetry at the New School
in New York City.





The Pouter

Inspiration for a clapping game
or finger play: tot up the
nimrods clogging the escalator.
At the psychological moment
you'd ream out parasols, or Peru.
In the end it was just a perfect
thing to do, that hail of hot metal.







Aquí se puede comprar camisetas perro*

The light was red so we stopped, and
now it is green so we go.
The seabreeze was laparoscopic.

Here's what we worshipped:

A watercolor
whose meaning is clear
but whose import is TBD.

And the casa recalled the perfect progressive!
I had been wishing you a good weekend, a good one.



* Sign on the gate of Elizabeth Bishop's former house in Key West







A Gathering

Isn't it a mystery, isn't it a giggle?
Feature-rich and surface dazzle.

When into the shattered room we shuffle
we all have a weary air, O.

And outside the wind bites its knuckles.
And inside the crowd has a new haircut.

This one is other-focused, a real cosmopolite.
That one's anointed, with spacious eyes.

Who wouldn't rather taste the froth
of May, candy-pink and candy-sweet?

The lecturer, brilliant, bashful, as always.
The muse-figure in hippie skirt, free with her favors.

“Be not afraid,” she says through her turtleneck.
“The dream is always the same: reason

deserts us and we are alive with life.”
She's a poser. Call her Miss Red.

Shake hands with Her Skinniness
and the mind veers hastily.

The voice you hear is the voice you heed.
(Startling and funny. Beautiful and startling!)

Gradually I realize that I have never truly given.
I'm vatic, I'm vestal, and I need some cute tops.







The Worm and the Cricket

Will you sleep tonight in crisp sheets
or tender? (The moon's shirrings like

the skin of an anus.) Oh these minimal
decisions, and the ground paved with creepings.

(Slippered feet on pathstones.) If you don't
pay attention you're a fool. (Your

minds fill with helium.) While the
one scratches out a none too tuneful

tune, the other digs with its whole damn
body, articulate, frightless, cool.