Paul Hostovsky
My favorite poets are the ones who can make me laugh and cry in the same poem, or book of poems. I smoked a lot of pot and played a lot of frisbee during my formative years, so I like poems that are intoxicatingly interesting and have lift. Humor and lift are inextricably related, I think. If that isn't a law of physics, well, maybe it should be. In particle physics, you know, there are 6 different kinds of quarks, known as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. I learned this while researching a poem about frisbees. We used to get high, then practice catching and throwing them until dark: forehand, backhand, overhead, under the legs, behind the back, and upside down. But the point is, well, our shared humanity. The point is, I think, to smile. I mean people have been smiling since Cro-Magnon. And I bet I would have liked history more if Mrs. Manganelli, in the 7th grade, had simply panned the classroom with a shiny, timeless smile, and said: "You know, children, people have been smiling since Cro-Magnon." I bet that would have gone a long way toward my enlightenment. The first assignment should have been to smile, to look around the classroom at each other smiling, then choose one smile--like a project or a special topic--divide up into pairs and try to imagine that smile occurring in a different century, a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, in a cave in France, or Pompeii, or Jerusalem, or Alexandria. Humor is all about recognition, and, I think, Heaven. Humor in a good poem says: The peace of God is a piece of cake. Heaven is here. Heaven is now. ________________________________________________________________________________________________
Getting Back at the Bullies of Junior High
You were nothing but question marks,
pushy, bellying question marks, weren’t you? weren’t you?
with no contexts but your chesty end-quote girlfriends,
turning up in my autobiography now, annoying
as typos. Why I oughta
delete you once and for all with one
stab of my little finger. And maybe I will!
But not before I’m done with you, not before
I’ve had some fun with you at your expense.
This is my turf now. My story. You could say
I’m God here, and you’re… whatever I say you are.
And I say you are nothing but little bold face punc-
tuation marks, come to an unfortunate end, sentenced
to eternity in this poem which is kicking your butt
by making you the butt of every joke in it.
And I think it’s going to be a very long poem.
And I think it’s going to be published simultaneously
in many languages, and in all the best magazines
with the biggest readerships. And now I’m thinking
it will be the title poem of my next collection,
and also my Collected Works, to be published posthumously
which I know is a big word for you, so let me tell you
what it means. It means I will be at peace, and you will be
still suffering eternal humiliation in this poem
which between you and me is beginning to bore me now. After all,
I have better things to do than waste my time
with your poem. Maybe I’ll just throw it out with you in it.
Maybe I’ll burn it. How about a little fire, question mark?
But it isn’t over until I say it’s over. And I say
it needs polishing. So go ahead, use your sleeve.
I’m going to sit over here now, and take a nap.
It had better be brilliant when I wake up.
Italian Cuisine
I’m visiting my half-sister Olga
in Bologna. She’s 45 and married
to an Italian. I’m 15, American, and the only
Italian word I know besides spaghetti
is baloney. My family
history reads like one of those libretti
where everyone is falling in love and jumping
out of windows. Alleluia, Allioop!
My nephew Dario, 4 years older than me (go
figure), takes me to a party on the Via Faenza
where everyone is smoking and eating
pot brownies. They take turns
practicing their English on the American.
I feel famous, then exploited.
Someone is telling a long hilarious joke
in Italian. All of my interpreters
are cracking up and rolling on the floor
mute with laughter. I smile helplessly,
sweep the floor with my eyes for the dropped
English. It evaporates like water in a pot
of giddy spaghetti. The brownies kick in.
I float to the window, look out at the porticos leapfrogging
to infinity through the streets of Bologna.
I close my eyes and see:
Olga in her kitchen, holding a rolling pin;
my father in Prague, holding a cigarette
like a leaky pen, pointing it drippingly up
at a portrait of Jan Masaryk who
jumped (go figure) out a window.
I see Wendy Iazzoni back in Jersey, smiling
at the end of a long tunnel in space—
I can see the gap between her teeth perfectly,
I can even see the gap between the buttons
of her blouse, which was always space enough—
when Dario taps my scapula and we lapse
into English. Back at Olga’s
it’s rigatoni for dinner—
little fluted tunnels floating
in a white wine sauce. I’m still
stoned. I hold one drippingly up
to my left eye while closing
my right: Olga floats into focus
glaring like the Inquisition at Dario
who’s holding a rigatoni telescope
of his own, peering through it across
the dinner table at me, the American
Galileo. “Nevertheless,
it moves,” I intone. We explode
into exorbitant laughter.
Confessional Poem
I admitted to the admitting nurse
the whole limp life story
of my dangling participle—
how it plagued me ever since the first
failure back in junior high school
English, undermining every love poem
I ever wrote, adding up to nothing
but an inability to form
true connection. An embarrassment,
it soon grew into a liability,
and finally a disability,
dismantling everything I ever
built, implying what I secretly
believed about myself was true—
I was undone, I told the nurse
who stopped me right there, lifting
one long delicate index finger
and saying politely, apologetically,
that the life story of my dangling participle,
however short, would not fit
in the field on her computer screen. She tilted
her terminal to face me, and I saw
the blinking cursor, the small blank space
her index finger indexed.
She asked if I could pare it down,
condense the reason for my being there
to a word or two, a noun preferably,
though the noun could be a verb
too. Yes, I thought, that’s it. If only—
if only my noun would verb!
Noun won’t verb, she typed with two
index fingers, nodding as she turned
the terminal to face her, and I thought
I caught a trace of pathos—
beautiful—in a corner of her mouth.
Thank you, I mouthed unvoiced,
having lost my voice in the emotional
and revelatory act
of giving the thing a name.
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Paul Hostovsky has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from the Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, and the Frank Cat Press. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is available from Main Street Rag. More at www.paulhostovsky.com.