Paul Hostovsky Verse-Virtual 2017 May

May 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 forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. For more info, please visit my website: www.paulhostovsky.com

Arse Poetica

Once in elementary school
I brought in my alimentary canal
for show and tell,

sat with it in the back row
of Mrs. Dysher’s 3rd grade class, dying
for a turn,

stood up in front of the whole class
empty-handed,
nothing up my sleeve but a long

sleeve which I opened at one end
as wide as it would go,
panned my astonished classmates with the pink

circle of its entrance
ringed by a good number of deciduous teeth,
turned

and dropped my pants
and would have indicated the other
end with my index finger but

Mrs. Dysher jumped up and threw
her arms around me,
threw herself over me like a rug

and contained that little fire of an idea
without quite putting it out
(censorship as hug)

so that it blazes up on its own, again and again
still now,
consuming me and I disappear.

(first appeared in Slant)

The Place of Literature

Mr. Gordon was perhaps a little tipsy
at the awards ceremony, perhaps a little
scornful of the football coach’s ode
to yardage, the basketball coach’s
paeons to the MVPs, the music teacher’s touting
her flautist, the science teacher his
scion of Einstein. So when Mr. Gordon
got up to give the literary magazine award
to me, he lurched a little drunkenly, swayed
a little imperceptibly, steeply rocking in his
moment on stage. Not to be outdone,
he said in his opinion I was probably
the greatest poet writing in English anywhere today--
and a gasp went up from the high school auditorium,
then murmurs of admiration and disbelief and
mutiny spread through the audience as I rose
to accept Mr. Gordon’s slightly exaggerated
handshake. Then he kissed me on the mouth,
and raised my hand above my head in the manner
of referees and prizefighters, grinning glaringly
over at the football coach, and nodding trochaically.

(first appeared in Bryant Literary Review)

Little Things

Me and Beth Jeannette had a little thing.
This was a long time ago when my
thing was little and I didn’t know anything
about such things. Somehow we ended up
upstairs in her bedroom on her bed
with her face very close to mine and a little
pimply. Her eyes were soft, her hands were
busy. My hands were folded politely
in my lap, as though waiting for tea or
poetry. My eyes, roaming the walls, found
an M.C. Escher print with tessellating
staircases, and climbed them peripherally
while Beth continued to block my view
with her nose. In the end, our little thing
was like those staircases—it went nowhere
though it seemed to be going somewhere,
especially when she touched my thing and I
had to go to the bathroom. All these years later
I look back on that little thing with fondness,
tenderness, and a little sadness, as though
I were looking back from deep within infinity
at my first tender, tentative tessellations.

(first appeared in Sendero)

Boxy Poem for Mr. Beck

Mr. Beck taught gym and sex education
back when there wasn’t a curriculum per
se. So he mostly punted in the classroom,
relating blow-by-blow what he and his wife
had done the night before. It was x-rated
and educational. You had to hand it to him
for thinking outside the box that was our
classroom; the box that was our high school;
the box that was our life in small town USA.
In gym we all did fifty pushups while Beck
walked among us, shirtless, like a gardener
coaxing a crop of calisthenic chrysanthemums
pushing up. He praised the virtue of the pushup,
said you could do them anywhere, anytime.
He said he did them all the time in his office
between classes, in his bedroom between sex
with his wife, and for all he knew he would
be doing pushups in his coffin after he died.
We could tell just by looking at his pecs that
he wasn’t bullshitting us. For all he knew we
didn’t love Mr. Beck. But we dearly believed him.

(first appeared in Coe Review)

Trombone Lesson

The twenty minutes from half past nine
to ten of ten is actually slightly longer
than the twenty minutes from ten of ten
to ten past ten, which is half downhill
as anyone who's ever stared at the hillocky
face of a clock in the 5th grade will tell you.
My trombone lesson with Mr. Leister
was out the classroom door and down
the tessellating hallway to the band room
which was full of empty chairs and music stands
from ten past ten to ten-forty, which is half
an hour and was actually slightly shorter
than the twenty minutes that came before or after
which as anyone who's ever played trombone
will tell you, had to do with the length of the slide
and the smell of the brass and also the mechanism
of the spit-valve and the way that Mr. Leister
accompanied me on his silver trumpet making
the music sound so elegantly and eminently
better than when I practiced it at home
for hours and hours which were all much shorter
than an hour actually, as anyone who's ever
practiced the art of deception with a musical
instrument will tell you, if he's honest and has any
inkling of the spluttering, sliding, flaring,
slippery nature of time, youth, and trombones.

(first appeared in Conte)

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