The Yale Review | Kathleen Ossip: “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. The best new writing here—and there. For a limited time, subscr

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