Ordinary Heaven
Ladan Osman
For Ladan Osman, poetry is a vehicle that
allows her to find that which is heavenly,
spiritually alive, and illuminating in the
ordinary details of life: marriage, divorce,
domestic work, dancing. Osman’s poems in
Ordinary Heaven interrogate, sometimes quite
literally, and her questions are not rhetorical.
They are urgent, often desperate, and the
reader shares the poet’s delight and relief
when some answers become available through
the quest for poetic beauty. Osman is among
a handful of emerging poets in the United
States who seem poised to reinvigorate the
form through candor and craft. Living in
America, her engagement with the shifting
cultural landscape of poetry is wholly aware
of worlds outside.
—Kwame Dawes
Titles in the
Seven New Generation African Poets
Box Set:
Mandible, by TJ Dema
The Cartographer of Water, by Clifton Gachagua
Carnaval, by Tsitsi Jaji
The Second Republic, by Nick Makoha
Ordinary Heaven, by Ladan Osman
Our Men Do Not Belong to Us, by Warsan Shire
Otherwise Everything Goes On, by Len Verwey
Seven New Generation African Poets:
An Introduction in Two Movements,
by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani
To order
the Seven New Generation African Poets box set
or for more information, please contact
Slapering Hol Press at:
www.writerscenter.org.
for my family
L.O.
*
This inaugural box set of new generation African poets
is dedicated to the memory of Ghanaian poet, Kofi
Awoonor (1935-2013), who was killed in the terrorist
attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
Look for a canoe for me
That I go home in it.
Look for it.
The lagoon waters are in storm
And the hippos are roaming.
But I shall cross the river
And go beyond.
from “I Heard a Bird Cry,” by Kofi Awoonor
This is the abridged, electronic version of Ordinary Heaven.
To purchase the original, full-length version, please contact
Slapering Hol Press, The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, 300
Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
(www.writerscenter.org)
Ordinary Heaven
Ladan Osman
S l a p e r i n g H ol P r e s s 2 0 1 4
in association with the African Poetry Book Fund, PRAIRIE SCHOONER,
and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
P OETS IN THE WORLD series
Compilation copyright © 2014
The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-940646-55-8
Copyright in each individual poem and in other material contained in this chapbook
remains with their respective rightsholders.
Cover and all other art reproductions used by permission
of the artist, Adejoke Tugbiyele.
The Poetry Foundation and the Pegasus logo are registered trademarks of
The Poetry Foundation.
“I Heard a Bird Cry,” by Kofi Awoonor, reproduced from The Promise of Hope: New and
Selected Poems, 1964–2013, Kofi Awoonor, by permission of the University of Nebraska
Press. © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Slapering Hol Press
The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
African Poetry Book Fund
Prairie Schooner
University of Nebraska
123 Andrews Hall
Lincoln, Nebraska 68588
The Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Chicago, Illinois 60654
Contents
4
9
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
21
22
23
25
26
27
Preface
Silhouette
Ordinary Heaven
The Nomads
Verse of Hairs
Shadow
Parable of the Leaf
How to Make a Shadow
Diviner of Tea Cups
The Kitchen-Dweller’s Interlude
The Kitchen-Dweller Testifies
Desertion
Situations Wanted
Clearing the Land
To the Angel of Accounts on a Holy Night
The Pilgrims
Water
Preface
By Ted Kooser
I met Ladan Osman several years ago at the Round Top Festival
Institute for Performance and Learning in Round Top, Texas, only a
short drive from Austin. Round Top, as it is known, is internationally
recognized as a place for young musicians and artists to study with
professional masters. A concert pianist, James Dick, built the festival
at the edge of a small town by moving in houses and buildings and
transforming them into places for living, study, and concert venues.
It is a place, too, for writers, with guest authors, scholarships,
and fellowships.
My friend, Naomi Shihab Nye, a frequent guest at Round Top,
had with her typical generosity encouraged the Board to invite me
to read my poems and to talk with poets. One noon I was standing
in the lunch line just ahead of several young women who were
talking about the writing program and their experiences with other
conferences and writing schools. One said she had found it difficult
to get anyone to take her poems seriously, to find someone who
would read and comment upon them. I turned to her and said I
would be happy to do that.
“Happy” is a word one drops into an offer like that without
thinking about it, and I had no idea at that moment how very happy
an experience this would be, reading these remarkable, eccentric,
and touching poems. I have rarely encountered a young poet whose
work was so completely its own thing, was so little influenced
by what trend might be elbowing itself forward on the writing
campuses. Osman is a worldly and acutely sensitive writer who
knows how to reach right through the sequined veil of fashion and
put her hand squarely on the reader’s heart, with frank and candid
expression, with unaffected wonder.
Here is a poet who is not at all manipulative. She asks her
questions — and there are lots of them— not rhetorically but
because she wants to hear the answers, to learn from them. It
occurs to me that Ladan Osman is one of the most inquisitive
poets I have ever read. And inquisitive is perhaps too weak a word,
so let me use questioning. Her work is questioning. She asks about
everything; she wants to know about everything. The rooms of these
poems are crowded with all manner of things and people she wants
to ask about. She picks up an image from one side of a room and
asks us about it. Then, she snatches another from the other side and
asks about that. She is almost out of breath from so much asking.
Why do you do that? Why do you do that to me?
In the title poem she says, “Here, I attend to my book of
questions.” Throughout these poems she takes a position on the
outside from which she hopes to find the way in, using the keys of
the answers. She wants those answers, and she wants to be a part
of what she sees, to be included in what we see. She does not say
it, but I will: “Notice me. Step out of your door and hear me now.
Notice me out here beyond you. Honor me by doing that.”
How different she is from so many new American poets, from
so many young Americans. How refreshingly candid. In an email to
me she once wrote, “Sometimes I dream of being a fat old woman
full of stories.” That’s not the kind of thing that one is likely to
overhear in the shopping mall or at the pilates class. There are even
a few farts in these poems. Farts and parts itching, sweat and heart
and bare-breasted honesty.
I love these poems; I love their feisty attitude, insistently poking
me in the sternum with their questions or pulling far back to stand
alone in the shadows across the street, a shadow herself, watching.
Sometimes watching with fear, always watching with wonder. I am
touched by the profound humanity of what you are about to read. I
trust you will feel the same.
Ordinary Heaven
Silhouette
at a Claudia Rankine reading,
University of Chicago, 2011
I enter: the carpet, the curtains,
the large, framed pictures of robed white men,
a glassy glare over a forehead, below the voice box,
the students in bland shades.
I don’t belong, the luxury of thinking,
the wealth of talking about thought,
the privilege of ease among important people.
I am afraid of them, their smell,
their cotton, their expensive running shoes,
their faces so hard to read
when they make odd-placed sighs
at black people histories. There is not one
bright color. A professor laughs—
quick, self-turning, a paper cut
to his own heart.
I hate myself for the shame of forgetting
the books on my shelf,
the many others read on the floors of libraries,
corners of bookstores where the cashier can’t see me.
Shame when I see all the book spines there ever were,
their colors and textures like women
bent in prayer on a high holy day.
My voice is small as it asks,
What will it matter to them if I make a book?
I am one poet. Isn’t there space for me?
And the tears were sweet, completely sweet
as if they meant, even now you don’t believe?
The colonizers couldn’t have dreamed it,
the preoccupation with the heights of my soul,
my intangible qualities, if I am only the silhouette
of a shadow. If this poet is white in third world countries,
what am I here? It’s possible I’m just like the wind in the curtains.
They monopolize part of the eye.
The wind makes its mischief in goose flesh.
A girl closes the window.
Ordinary Heaven
I arrange a doll in a chair and wait for her to speak.
I want to say, “Be!” but am an ordinary creation.
I watch for the folds under her eyes to twitch.
I have many dreams, I say to her.
In my dreams I’m better than myself.
I soften peppers in a well-greased pan and make announcements.
I say, in the afterlife we cannot allow a single particle of our light
to diminish. I am not a woman-prophet
but I know paradise. I have seen my soul sitting on grass.
There, I learned God doesn’t know shame, and after six days
He allowed our atmosphere to make certain souls wince;
we crawl under its magnificence. Here, I can attain ordinary heavens.
Here, I attend to my book of questions. What is love? Why does it say,
“Allow me to mogul your soul?” Where does it keep what it takes?
What does the prostrating shadow request? Why do rocks enslave
water? What is the slave’s poem? Does the sea favor its roar
or murmur?
The doll cannot answer. The furrow in her bottom lip suggests
that entry into ordinary heaven only requires recognition of it,
for the soul’s arrogance to weigh less than a mustard seed.
I am sorry for you, I tell her.
You witness but don’t testify.
The Nomads
We are seeds that don’t know where to settle. We are the nomads.
My God, we are toiling. We are dusty-footed.
To where have we been walking all this time, the earth,
the horizon receding?
Guide us as You do the birds and the spiders and the dandelion fluff
that know their homes.
We will not be the beetle that flees up and across the prayer house wall.
We will not run beneath the skirts of disgusted women.
How many of us are a woman with a broom in her hand?
How many of us are watching the beetle?
If mouths feel stuffed with wool before death, we must be dying soon.
Give us water or take us into the sea.
Shadow
Walk as God intended. Straight, even.
Not prostrating, a shadow.
And not too proud.
I have the complex my father warned against.
When the woman whose hair is like down spits near my shoe and says,
“This neighborhood has changed since these people came,”
I can’t say, “You are the spitter, you are the trash.”
I’m the shadow prostrating.
Not the shadow as it lengthens,
water spilling from a heavy bucket.
Can you smell my scalp through my scarf?
Earth after water licks it.
How to Make a Shadow
Give her the spirit of a dog,
a black dog with a sword in her paws.
Tether her. Put Position
at the bottom of a well filled with rats,
rats with shining backs, their eyes shillings
in the pocket of a man who sweats,
sweats at the ass crack for Position.
Say to her, bark, and she moans. Sudden chorus.
The grass sits up to listen and asks:
Who is the weed that will not sever?
Why won’t the earth take water? Say, bark,
and she bites the space between ankle and sole. Say, no,
to her. Be quiet. Like, may the seed stop up your throat.
Or, hold the sword between your teeth. Cut your tongue.
Say, I nigger your heart, I eat your sleep. I give you the dream
where you kneel and can’t straighten.
Get down from here, into the well.
Fight the rat or let him ride
like a disaster on your shoulders. Say, no.
Say, don’t open your mouth again. Or try to open it
with a bridle there. I ride you when you’re so small, small beast.
No.
It will ring as omen: smiling dead squirrel at the curb,
shining scythe under a bus bench,
dead birds in a nest, dark feather under the doormat.
Black tongue, black roof of mouth, black paw pads,
black nails, black snout, black spit.
Say, die, and she comes like a jinn,
silk shadow at your bedside:
I nigger your dreams,
bitter seed in the well of your throat. I will not scatter
from your heart. I grow a tree there.
I rest in its shadow.
Diviner of Tea Cups
The brew is a woman lifting her skirt
for a man who’s seen what’s beneath.
He makes no distinction
between her and stewed carrots.
There’s one woman who serves tea to the second wife.
She varies clove and sugar but it’s hard
to guess her meaning as she watches the other woman drink,
an amber band across her front teeth from all the good tea.
If she makes too little, it’s worse
than loaning a thief the kettle
because she will never watch murky water
fall from its spout, leave a pebbled trail behind her.
When the tea bags sit too long or not long enough
her mattress will be lonely before her temples gray.
Did she want it to happen, or just watch,
a child who no longer responds to slaps?
The Kitchen-Dweller’s Interlude
I will put into this bread a storm gathering water.
Do not take me, do not include me in this, the water says,
its plea a cat’s purr, or a tree full of cicadas.
I will uproot your olive tree. I will smooth the bark or send
something to build a fungus like a small sun in its cavities.
What is the smell of trouble?
Love-trouble is poison on the roof of the mouth.
I want to have museum-trouble, the way the air changes
before someone cuts a portrait.
Into this bread I put the dog that runs after his owner’s car, free as a horse.
Also a horse’s tail trying to unbraid.
And a muzzle.
And the taste of gutter water. I stare dumbly at it.
Abase myself.
Is our love water I can’t drink?
I blow a note into the hot oven, into the gap
between oven and counter top.
The Kitchen-Dweller Testifies
My husband has attempted murder with my own heart.
Percuss my chest and feel its resonance. Tap once, twice,
listen briefly with the palm of your hand, a fingertip.
I swear an oath, once, twice, thrice,
curse myself the fourth time.
Ask him about the night he told me he didn’t know me,
and untangled me from himself like the tassels of an old shawl.
I tried to catch his nail, confuse his fingers.
Let him, too, swear an oath and open his chest so that we can see
the nights he speaks to me: I waited, I missed you.
Let him answer for the hand he put under my t-shirt
since the first days so he could feel me walking.
He must tell everyone here our story without confusion,
with every sentiment, in falsetto so everyone wonders if he’s lying.
He described a wall reaching far into our past and once I saw it,
I couldn’t climb it. I looked for a crack to wail into
but there was none, so I wailed the way
the least heartbroken woman at a funeral wails.
Then I wailed in earnest and chanted, warm, warm, and packed
every good sweater I own in a duffel bag. I cursed myself
for leaving him without my papers and gold. How could I leave
without two of my three wealths?
I swear he didn’t follow me.
I didn’t feel sorry embracing an airport toilet.
I offered my dreams as payment for three nights without response
from God and woke the fourth morning homicidal.
None can verify either testimony. There may have been a jinn
in the corner of the bathroom one dawn
but I think it turned away from my commotion.
If I’m lying may a chaos carry me into an unknown land
without rain or tree to shelter me from desertion.
May my mouth move westwards and never return.
May I die and find myself living in a meek woman’s mouth:
my territory— tip of tongue
to fleshy palate, from inner cheek to inner cheek.
I’ll know her humming, how it strains her throat
because she refuses to sing even a quiet note, even alone.
The Pilgrims
Something is pressing against the hymen of madness,
and the clouds blush where streetlights seek them out.
The wind tries to run but is my herald.
It circles the cat that buries what is present.
I undressed madness and cannot unwelcome
my lust for her.
When she comes, we will bow against a sun
that regrets lighting our path.
If I look, I will not be able to see her,
but when I reach out my hand, I will feel her there,
and her back will say, walk.
Water
I came to you carrying water. I came to you
carrying silted water from a well,
muddied, carried in a bucket with a split lip.
My water tasted salty, and like the earth, and so
like blood, and I brought as much as I could carry
in a bucket that drooled tiny streams of water
on my mud-ashen legs.
In all our days together I have walked between well
and house enough so the path is marked
with the branching roads of my soles.
I have come to you so often the path has many other roads
if only you kneel in the dust and look for them.
I am subject to you in the way the water is subject
to the moon. You are subject to me in the way a wall
is subject to its roof. And like the water I expect
you to come upon me of a sudden, like flesh
out of a slit in cloth. And like the wall you expect
intimate collapses, capillaries of change
inscribed day by day on our surfaces.
I came to you with water from my deep well.
I came to you with earth for your ready water,
water in every crevice for the valley
that divides your tongue.
I held your head in my lap and traveled
the many roads leading out of that valley.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the editors of the publications in which these
poems first appeared:
Artful Dodge: “The Kitchen-Dweller’s Interlude” and “To the Angel
of Accounts on a Holy Night”
Kweli Journal: “Silhouette.” Copyright © 2011. Used by permission
of the publisher.
Narrative Magazine: “Ordinary Heaven,” “Water,” “Desertion,”
“How To Make a Shadow,” and “Shadow.” Copyright © 2013.
Used by permission of the publisher.
Prairie Schooner: “Situations Wanted” and “The Kitchen-Dweller
Testifies.” Copyright © 2012. Used by permission of the publisher.
riverbabble: “Parable of a Leaf ”
ROAR Magazine: “Diviner of Tea Cups”
Vinyl: “Verse of Hairs”
“Silhouette” appeared in the Union League Civic & Arts
Foundation chapbook (2012).
I am grateful to the Michener Center for Writers through the
University of Texas at Austin, Cave Canem Foundation, the Fine
Arts Work Center, and The Luminarts Cultural Foundation for
their generous support of my work.
About the author:
Ladan Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts
Work Center, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Michener
Center for Writers. She was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her
work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Life in Poetry,
Artful Dodge, Broadsided, Narrative Magazine, Prairie Schooner,
RHINO, and Vinyl Poetry. She lives in Chicago.
*
About the artist:
Adejoke Tugbiyele was born in Brooklyn, New York, to
Nigerian parents. Her work has been on exhibit at Aljira, a
Center for Contemporary Art; Galerie Myrtis; the Museum
of Arts and Design; the Museum of Biblical Art; the Reginald
F. Lewis Museum; the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC; the
United Nations Headquarters; the Centre for Contemporary
Art in Lagos in Nigeria; and the FNB Joburg Art Fair (2013) in
Johannesburg, South Africa. Her short film, AfroOdyssey IV: 100
Years Later, will premiere in Spain at LOOP 2014 Barcelona
and at the Goethe-Institut (Washington, DC, and Lagos,
Nigeria). AfroOdyssey III, the previous series, will be part of the
2013– 2015 international exhibition “Sights and Sounds: Global
Film and Video” at the Jewish Museum of New York. Tugbiyele
is an Artist-in-Residence at Gallery Aferro and the recipient of
several awards including the 2013–2014 Fulbright U.S. student
fellowship, the 2014 Serenbe Artist-in-Residence program,
the 2013 Amalie Rothschild Award, and the 2012 William M.
Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture. Tugbiyele holds a
Master’s of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute
College of Art. Her work is in the permanent collection of
the Newark Museum and significant private collections in the
United States.
Published by Slapering Hol Press
in association with
the African Poetry Book Fund, Prairie Schooner,
and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Poets in the World series
*
THE HUDSON VALLEY WRITERS’ CENTER, a nonprofit organization, presents
public readings featuring established and emerging writers, offers workshops in
many genres, and organizes educational programs for school children, people in
underserved communities, and those with special needs.
In 1990, the Center’s small press imprint, SLAPERING HOL PRESS, was
established to advance the national and international conversation of poetry and
poetics, principally by publishing and supporting the works of emerging poets.
The AFRICAN POETRY BOOK FUND, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, promotes
and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its
book series, contests, workshops, seminars, and through its collaborations with
publishers and other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa.
Together with Prairie Schooner, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s international
literary quarterly, the African Poetry Book Fund sponsors a yearly chapbook series.
THE HARRIET MONROE POETRY INSTITUTE (HMPI) is an independent forum
created by the Poetry Foundation to provide a space in which fresh thinking about
poetry, in both its intellectual and practical needs, can flourish free of allegiances
other than to the best ideas. The Institute convenes leading poets, scholars,
publishers, educators, and other thinkers from inside and outside the poetry world
to address issues of importance to the art form of poetry and to identify and
champion solutions for the benefit of the art.
Seven New Generation African Poets is part of a collaboration with the Poets in the
World series created by the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
The Poets in the World series supports research and publication of poetry and
poetics from around the world and highlights the importance of creating a space
for poetry in local communities. For more information about the Poetry Foundation,
please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Poets in the World series: Publications, 2013–2014
Ilya Kaminsky, HMPI director,
Poets in the World series editor
Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World, edited by Catherine Barnett and
Tiphanie Yanique (Tupelo Press)
Elsewhere, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Open Letter Books)
Fifteen Iraqi Poets, edited by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions Publishing)
“Landays: Poetry of Afghan Women,” edited by Eliza Griswold (Poetry, June 2013)
New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Ming Di (Tupelo Press)
Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic
Luxford, and Jesse Nathan (McSweeney’s)
Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, edited by Raúl Zurita and Forrest
Gander (Copper Canyon Press)
Seven New Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (Slapering
Hol Press)
Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets, edited by Valzhyna
Mort (Red Hen Press)
The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden, edited and translated by Malena Mörling and
Jonas Ellerström (Milkweed Editions)
The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders, edited by Jared Hawkley, Susan Rich,
and Brian Turner (McSweeney’s)
Upcoming African Poetry Book Fund Series Titles
Kofi Awoonor, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems: 1964–2013 (University of
Nebraska Press, 2014)
Clifton Gachagua, Madman at Kilifi (University of Nebraska Press, 2014)
Upcoming Slapering Hol Press Titles
Richard Parisio, The Owl Invites Your Silence (2015)
Julie Danho, Six Portraits (2014)
Molly Peacock and Amy M. Clark, A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation
& a Conversation (2014)
Colophon
This book was designed and set in Eric Gill’s Perpetua and
Gill Sans types by Ed Rayher at Swamp Press in Northfield,
Massachusetts. The text and cover stocks of this chapbook
are Cougar Opaque. Digital printing by Printech of Stamford,
Connecticut. Swamp Press hand-bound, letterpress books can
be found in rare book rooms at major institutions in the United
States and Canada. Ed is a poet, letterpress printer, and publisher
of limited edition books of poetry. He has a MFA and a PhD
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2015, his next
book of poems, The Paleontologist’s Red Pumps, will be released
from Hedgerow Press.
Ladan Osman has received
fellowships from the Fine Arts
Work Center, Cave Canem
Foundation, and the Michener
Center for Writers. She was
a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in American Life in
Poetry, Artful Dodge, Broadsided,
Narrative Magazine, Prairie
Schooner, RHINO, and Vinyl Poetry.
She lives in Chicago.
“Here is a poet who is not at all manipulative. She
asks her questions— and there are lots of them— not
rhetorically but because she wants to hear the answers,
to learn from them. It occurs to me that Ladan Osman
is one of the most inquisitive poets I have ever read.
And inquisitive is perhaps too weak a word, so let me
use questioning. Her work is questioning. She asks about
everything; she wants to know about everything. The
rooms of these poems are crowded with all manner of
things and people she wants to ask about. She picks up an
image from one side of a room and asks us about it. Then,
she snatches another from the other side and asks about
that. She is almost out of breath from so much asking.
Why do you do that? Why do you do that to me?”
—Ted Kooser
from the Preface
Seven New Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani,
a publication of Slapering Hol Press in association with the African Poetry Book Fund,
Prairie Schooner, is published as part of the Poets in the World series created by
the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
Ilya Kaminsky is the Poets in the World series editor.