Good morning, blog readers! Welcome to another installment of our weekly Pick-a-Poem feature. Each Wednesday on the blog, we feature a new poem from someone whose work you may not have read before. Our featured poems come from Poetry Daily, which is an awesome site that features a new poem every day. This week’s featured poem here at the blog is A. in September by Kathleen Ossip.
According to the bio page on Poetry Daily, Kathleen Ossip has written several books, including The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2011. She also wrote The Search Engine and Cinephrastics, which was a chapbook made up of movie poems. She was a founding editor of LIT and is the poetry editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly.
A. in September by Kathleen Ossip
A piece of you flew into me one day, a
Niggling hooked little finger of spirit. I was
Driving. It didn’t hurt, it tickled.
Randomly, I’d been wondering how to become a baby cuddler.
Even though I didn’t have a baby anymore, I could substitute.
After all, lots of hospitals must need cuddlers.Forget it, I thought immediately. It wouldn’t be the same.
Oh! It tickled when I knew it would never be the same and I
Remembered suggesting it to you once, when you were
Sad there were no more babies in your life, no
Toddlers, your grandchildren were tweens now—
Except you didn’t like the idea. You wanted a connection you couldn’t
Really get from a scheduled cuddle with an unrelated baby,Only from an impossible baby of your own.
So you had limitations too. What you taught me:
Screw limitations. Love anyway, and hard.
I remembered this when it flew, the
Piece in me of you.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s featured poem! For more posts like this, click here!
— Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
