Elevator and Bus

With strangers, she stepped

into an elevator to be lifted.
Doors closed, doors opened:

onto a bus where she sat
riding with new strangers.
"I didn't want this," she said

to a gray-haired woman.
"No one does," said the woman.
Then everyone began to sing

a song she did not know.
"I'm scared," she said to
a weary, kind brown man.

"It is all right," he said.
"This is the bus we're on,
and all of us are frightened?

hans ostrom, 2025

The Woman in the Pasture

Roaming one of your thought

neighborhoods, you hear a coin

hit a hard floor, listen as it

oscillates its way into settling flat.

You drift into a vast hall

where a shaft of sunlight

pings off the silvery coin:

you go over, lean, and look.

Symbols on it perplex.

Now a horse snorts, 

and the hall becomes a pasture

& the coin becomes

a pendant nestled

in the cleavage of a woman's

brown breasts. "So that belongs

to you, then?" you ask. "No,

but you do," says she.

hans ostrom 2024

Cat's Eyes Revery

I left sleep's velvet shack,

walked across a field of dew-

doused feathers, arrived

at two identical round ponds,

both glowing pale green

like a cat's eyes. I

then picked up a couple spongy 

pale yellow orbs, palm-sized,

tossed one into one pond,

the other into the other.

They floated to the centers

of the ponds and turned dark.

The nearby forest, black

in shadow, purred loudly,

vibrating my ribs, cranium,

and feet. At my back came

a cold rough breeze. 

hans ostrom 2024

The Revision

It's the end of the semester. The last essay is due
to me, professor. He, student, misses the final class
and struggles to my office afterwards. He stands
in the doorway, exhausted, and tells me his dream:

"Somehow you'd gotten hold of my essay
before I wanted to turn it in. You assigned
it a grade of the square-root of A. Your
only comment was Very suburban. Then I
stole back the essay before you had
recorded the grade.  I put an A in
the online grading system, next to my name,
and then I watched as the essay
revised itself, prose metamorphosis."

"I'll be darned," I say.  He gives me
the essay.  I look at it.  "Well," I say,
"you'd better put your name on it"



hans ostrom 2017

"The Absinthe Drinker," by Arthur Symons