Ladan Osman was born in Somalia and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She earned a BA from Otterbein University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. In 2014 her poetry collection The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimomy won the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Osman lives in Chicago.

Water

by Ladan Osman

I came to you carrying water. I came to you

carrying silted water from a well,
muddied water 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.
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