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You Can't Buy Shoes in a Painting

By Jill Osier b. 1974 Jill Osier

You can't even buy a soda. You can only

see these things, see a mother steer

her son to the car, his head cocked

licking his ice cream.

Earlier, driving, trying to keep

between two cornfields, I couldn't see myself

into a map, couldn't be anywhere in it,

though I knew all the patient states

between us.

Pigeons sit high on a mill's peaked roof,

spaced even as beads. They can stand that

close to each other, but looking at them

you wouldn't know it. Would you.

Source: Poetry (June 2005).

Biography

Jill Osier's work has been awarded a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. She is the author of a letterpress chapbook Bedful of Nebraskas. Her poems appear widely.

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