Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Search Engine (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), which won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and of Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has been widely published in journals, reviews, and national newspapers. Ossip teaches at the New School in New York and is an editor at large.

Three Prayers

by Kathleen Ossip

Mouth

But we do despise beauty.

We connect it with softness and immortality.
I never sleep at night

but I remember:
a yellow inflatable cat
a waxed church pew

and the long low labor moans.

People on couch
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