Kathleen Ossip

From the Sixth Floor

The church spire’s a grandmother, crafted, hoping.
The chimney’s a grandfather, tense and solid.
The slate roof’s a mother, spread out and open.
The mansard a father, blind, helmeted.
The gray trees are children, their fingers velveted.
The leaves their ideas, broken and broken.

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. She is a 2016-2017 Radcliffe fellow and editor of the poetry review website SCOUT.