Join Kate Asche in celebrating April Ossmann and her newest poetry collection! Bring your burning publishing, editing and writing questions for the Q&A.
THIS Saturday, 4/22, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. at Kate’s J Street Writing Loft (Note: Classroom is on the Second Floor)
**Free**
18th & J in Midtown Sacramento
kateasche.com/guestwriters
Camille Norton
DELAY
You sit on a chair waiting for the results to be explained.
You think of the years before love, the trembling in advance of pleasure.
This is a different kind of waiting.
You say to yourself: Let me delay this if I can.
It is how you have always responded to suffering.
You know you must face it. And yet you sit on a chair,
eating apples as if it were any day, perhaps your birthday.
The apples are sweet and hard.
Their wine-sap drizzles down your chin.
You rake their flesh.
You take your time with them.
When you come to the last apple,
how carefully you eat its latticed core.
One by one, its bitter seeds.
As you wait outside the door.
April Ossmann is the author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music, both from Four Way Books, and has published poetry in numerous journals including New England Review, Harvard Review and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books), and is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a 2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. She has also published essays including Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript (Poets & Writers, March/April 2011), and a biography/critical study of poet Lynda Hull in American Writers Supplement XXI (Charles Scribner’s Sons).
April Ossmann
“Sigh,” from Event Boundaries:
April snow bends
each lilac branch,
heavy and wet
as your body on mine
after love-making,
but less warm—
in truth, a better simile
for loss than love,
though love appears
predicated on loss—
or the fear of it—
surely, every new love
predicts new loss—
branch, you bend
more easily than we,
but sooner break.
This snow’s weeping
is its vanishing,
but the lilac’s sigh of relief
is not its life—
no breath is ours to keep,
just as no body is.
