Paul Hostovsky Verse-Virtual 2017 July

July 2017

I live with my wife and two step-children in the Boston area where I work as a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor. I think I may be the only person on the face of the planet who reads Braille while driving to work, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road—eyes on the road. I also play a mean blues harmonica. My ninth collection of poetry, Is That What That Is, is just out from FutureCycle Press. For more info, please visit my website: www.paulhostovsky.com

Passive Voice

It is given to me
is the passive they’re parsing
in linguistics class.

He’s the sign language interpreter
for the deaf student making
eyes at him

and noise with her corn chips’
plastic wrapper.
She’s tonguing a corn chip

and wrinkling her nose
which she knows he knows
means ooh salty,

and telling him in
no uncertain terms,
It is given to you.

Sometimes it happens
that way, love
just lands in your lap,

starts conjugating itself
in the second person
singular.

He will ask her to marry him,
to give up linguistics,
come live with him in

a house in the suburbs
among the Thickly
Settled signs.

Here’s the church
and here’s the steeple.
The deaf people sit

where they can see
the sign language interpreter.
They will name their first child

Vowel, after
the dilating mouth
of pleasure,

fill their home
with the tongues of a hundred
speechless lives:

the plosives of fish
browsing the fishbowl,
the shrugging shoulders

of the spider plants,
the noiseless stutter
of candles—

it’s all just tremblingly,
achingly waiting
to be

received.



Hegemony

Three of my cousins are deaf.
But I have lots of cousins,
so the deaf ones
were always in the minority
at family gatherings
where they’d commandeer a couch
or the kitchen table and juggle
their hands. It was a language
the rest of us didn’t understand
because we never bothered to learn it.
Their conversations and our conversations
sailed along contiguously
like ships passing in the night
or like an English frigate passing
over a Deaf submarine during
detente. One by one they got married
to three deaf spouses. So then there were six.
And one of them ended up having
two deaf children. So then there were eight.
Eventually they all divorced
and remarried other deaf people
with deaf stepchildren and deaf exes
and deaf in-laws and deaf
cousins. And before we knew it
we were totally outnumbered
at the family gatherings
and consigned to a corner
of the sectional, whispering
and ducking the flying hands,
feeling rather small
and blind, like moles or voles
trembling in the shadows
of the raptors.

Deaf and Dumb

The Deaf man in the waiting room
asks me how long I’ve been working
as an interpreter. I tell him
many years. Awesome, he says.
We sit there chatting, waiting
for the doctor to come.

He tells me a little about himself.
His parents and grandparents are Deaf.
His siblings are Deaf. His two young children
are fourth generation Deaf. The hereditary
master status of a kind of Deaf aristocracy
in the Deaf world. And I am duly
impressed. My turn to say: Awesome.

He is getting his Ph.D. in sociolinguistics.
His signing is graceful, fluid, symphonic—
like water everywhere seeking its own
level. Chatting him up in the waiting room
is a pure joy, one of the perks
of my profession.

But the doctor is dumb about Deaf people.
In the little examining room
he doesn’t address the Deaf man directly
but tells me to “tell him” this, “ask him” that.
The Deaf man notices, tells the doctor
to tell him himself, in the second person.
But the doctor doesn’t know what the second person is.

He examines the Deaf man but he doesn’t
see him. He doesn’t look in his eyes.
He says to say “Ahh,” but the Deaf man
refuses to vocalize, mouth wide open,
fists forming at his sides, uvula
hanging there like a punching bag,
silent and motionless,
while we wait.

"Passive Voice" and "Hegemony" are from Hurt Into Beauty (FutureCycle Press, 2012)
"Deaf and Dumb" is from Is That What That Is (FutureCycle Press, 2017)
© 2017 Paul Hostovsky

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