Ladan Osman, a 2021 Whiting Award winner, was born in Somalia and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers and is the author of the poetry collections The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and Exiles of Eden, which won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She lives in New York.

Ordinary Heaven

by Ladan Osman

I arrange a doll in a chair and wait for her to speak.

I want to say “Be!” to her but am an ordinary soul.
I watch for the fold under her eye to twitch.


I have many dreams, I say to her.
In my dreams I am better than myself.
People on couch
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