Midsummer Dream House

 

What happened with you guys anyway?

because what I heard was
you both walked away
from your unhappy marriages
two children each
to be with each other
that it started at work
the way it sometimes does
that you’d worked together
closely the kind of closely
that can sometimes lead to play
the kind of play that can
turn serious in a heartbeat
a head-tilt a glance then a glancing away
then a looking back again
a smile that turns suddenly hungry
which I heard it did
and it turned everyone against you
when they heard what you did
leaving your families for each other
but I want you to know
when I heard I was first of all
happy for you and maybe a little
titillated to think of you both
finding love among the cubicles
right there on the desk or maybe
under it on the floor
and when I heard the grumblings
and judgments and condemnations
I felt compelled to send you
that Hallmark card did you get it?
because Congratulations
seemed the right thing to say somehow
but then more recently I heard
that you’re not together anymore
or rather you’re still working together
but you’re not together together
and I thought to myself that’s gotta be hard
and I know it’s none of my business but
what happened with you guys anyway?

 

Cocksure

I haven’t been sure of my cock since that day
it refused to stand up when it was supposed to–
which was the day we were scheduled to “do it”
one truant spring afternoon in my father’s house
when I was 16 and Faith was 18 and naked
and cocksure and straddling me on the bed, whispering
“fuck me, fuck me.” I’m not exactly sure why
it wouldn’t stand up. It may have had something to do
with the age differential, or the vertical differential,
or the breathy imperative coming down from on high,
or the several weightinesses: There was the weightiness
of Faith herself, who wasn’t twiggy, chafing and bobbing
on top of me; and the weightiness of the prospect
of losing my virginity; and the weightiness of her position
as the editor of the literary magazine vis a vis my position
as the diffident young poet whose exquisite death poem
had blown her and the entire literary magazine staff away
with its lively metaphors and imagery and weightiness,
which I borrowed from the weightiness of the dying
of my father, from colon cancer, only two months before.
It was his poem and it was his death. And the bed was
his bed–he had moved out of my parents’ bedroom
when the pain got so bad he had to be alone–on which
Faith was alternately declaiming lines from my poem
and breathlessly adding the refrain “fuck me, fuck me”
while I lay beneath her, cock soft, in my father’s
sickbed, dying to fuck her, unable to, wanting to die.

Poetry by Paul Hostovsky
Cocksure first published in Beaver Magazine, 2021

 

 

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com