Paul Hostovsky
About gender, and maybe this is a guy thing, but I always get it mixed up with sex. Like just the other day, I was trying to remember if biweekly was twice a week or every other, and so I tried to think of another bi-word to see if it would shed some light, and the one that came to mind, and I don’t think this is a guy thing, was bisexual, which of course means both, so biweekly must mean twice in the same week, I figured, because making love just once every other week is not what you would call a good sex life, especially if you’re a guy, like me, but maybe you’re not like me at all, I mean maybe you get paid hourly, maybe you never masturbate, and maybe bipartisan support for gay marriage is not something you’re happy about exactly. Maybe you think it means the world is going to hell, in a word. Well, you have a right to your opinion. But the fact is, God did not create the world—in fact I doubt He even knows we’re here—because the world is a kind of dream we’re having fast asleep in heaven. I don’t think there’s sex in heaven, but if there is it would technically have to be masturbation, because we’re all one and the same in heaven, though here in the world we forget that. We forget that we are all one and the same. We forget it every single day of the week, except Sunday, or Saturday, depending on your persuasion, your orientation, but not your gender. In heaven there is no gender.
Flowers
Richard Singer threw like a girl
and ran like a girl, and though all the girls
insisted he wasn’t a girl, the boys to a man
said he was. Richard said nothing but stared demurely off
whenever teams were picked on the muddy schoolyard—
kids plucked up by their last names, one by one,
till only Singer, the girlish boy whom no one liked,
was left in the middle, the last seed in the pod, the lone
petal. “Flowers,” explained Miss Finkel in science class,
“have male and female parts in a single plant.”
Then she wrote the names of those parts on the blackboard: Anther,
Stamen, Pistil, Ovary (girls giggling in the back)…
As Singer copied each word with a flourish, the boys
sat stiffly in their desks and gnawed their pencils.
A Woman Taking Off Her Shirt
does so with arms crossed
over her belly
like she’s hugging herself
and each hand takes hold
above the opposite hip
and off it comes in a fluid
motion like a fountain shooting up
and falling down in a great arc
the shirt rising up and the breasts
rising and falling and the hair
falling and finally the hands
falling to her sides with the shirt
in one hand inside-out
while the man
taking off his shirt
wrestles it off
grabs his own collar first
like he’s going to beat himself up
then dips his chin down like a fighter
into the dark well of the shirt
and climbs down in it
reaching back and grabbing a hold
and pulling it up over himself
and pulleying himself
down through it and out
The Tow
As if the book were more important
than the man
with the flatbed and the winch
from the Triple A
backing up his truck
with that backing-up-truck sound
into a position that
resembled the way the females of some species
will offer themselves sexually to the males,
she went back to reading
and didn’t see him hit the lever
that extended the flatbed out,
or the other lever that tilted it
down to the ground at just the right pitch
that allowed her car to mount it
when it was ready—
but it wasn’t ready because
he hadn’t gotten down yet on his knees
so you could see his butt crack
(which she didn’t see because
she was reading)
to look for a good place underneath
to attach the hooks and chains
at the end of the cable which the winch
paid out like a fishing net
and would haul back in
with her car attached
like a catch,
like a big fish mounting a bigger fish,
which may or may not have resembled
the mating habits of fish,
when he hit the third and final lever,
the one in the middle with the red handle
which would have made her wonder
what that one did
if she had been looking,
but she wasn’t looking and it’s no wonder
because she was reading
because the book was more important
than the man.
Paul Hostovsky’s 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. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and The Best of the Net. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is available from Main Street Rag. A new collection, Dear Truth, is forthcoming also from Main Street Rag. To read more of Paul’s poetry, visit his website www.paulhostovsky.com.