Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida.

One “new” poetic form that has become increasingly popular in recent decades is the prose poem. Perhaps I should mention that poetry is such an ancient art that anything in the last century still qualifies as, well, relatively new. Denise Levertov, whom I discussed earlier, wrote many. It’s one of the few forms we have not delved into previously in this series.

What is a prose poem? Basically it is something written with poetically descriptive language and maybe some other features of sound and rhythm and thought structure, in a largely unstructured physical form (think paragraphs). If you’ve read enough, you can probably think of some story writers who write this way. Sandra Cisneros is a good example.

Today’s poem is by Somali-American poet Ladan Osman, whom I had the pleasure of listening to as she was reading her poem Water during a book launch for Saddiq Dzukogi, who we may feature later in the series. Her poem The Keyis written in prose style and comes from her Book, The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony, published in 2015.

The voice in the poem is reminiscent of Esperanza from Cisneros’ House on Mango Street in terms of a child's observational language. It encapsulates three narrative pieces - overhearing her parents discussing a problem, trying to understand the problem at a child’s level, and going off on a personal quest to try and find a solution - though whether that search was real, or imagined, is something even the unnamed narrator cannot tell for certain.

On a very different level, it is clearly an allegory for the disparity in opportunity between white and black in America, on perhaps the same level of symbolism the movie Parasite used to show economic class disparities in Korean society, but Osman does it very effectively in the space of a single paragraph.

The metaphorical key in question is whatever will open the door of opportunity for her father, and her family. She assumes it is a real key and takes the fanciest key she can find from among her family’s collection and tries all of the doors around town, hoping to find one that opens. When she does finally succeed, she becomes entrapped in a place that is alien and terrifying, full of hard white surfaces. She finds no answers, she just feels frightened and alone, until “a surprised guy, white, wearing white” releases her, from her nightmare.

The child’s viewpoint makes us think through the images she describes, from her view of her parents toes from under the table, to the dark cloud that hovers over her house, the “darkest” in the neighborhood, to the letters written in spit on her dusty leg, the dresser with the crooked mouth, and the metal keys that smell like a missing tooth.

Osman’s allegory is emblematic of our current times, when half of our society seems to be beginning to understand the disparities that exist, and the other half is doggedly keeping their eyes wide shut. By using a child’s viewpoint, she gives us a vision of both how cruel and how damaging hatred is, for a child, and for us all.

If you ever get the opportunity to hear Ladan Osman read, please take advantage of it. The full text of The Key is available at poets.org.

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