Paul Hostovsky
GEOGRAPHIC TONGUE*
My daughter wants to see the world.
She's nineteen and fearless.
I wrestled Marc Silva in the 8th grade.
He threw me down on the mat
and pinned me in thirty seconds.
Those red lesions on your left dorsal
look a little suspicious, my dentist said.
She will go to Mexico, Guatemala,
Colombia and Brazil.
Silva's biceps were thigh-thick.
He flexed them and they sang.
My mother loved Edith Piaf. Robert
Zimmerman is an excellent oral surgeon
with an office in Norwood, my dentist said.
It's also Bob Dylan's real name, I said.
Then I waited a month for an appointment,
during which time I developed cancer
of the mouth and esophagus, in my head.
Piaf is French forlittle sparrow. Tongue
is the strongest muscle in the human body.
Silva is the most common surname in Brazil.
Everything turns out fine. She ends up
marrying a man twenty years her junior.
He invites me to his house to lift weights.
She dances through the drug wars
like hopscotch. He says they're just fissures.
Which sounds like fishers. Dorsal fins.
Fishers of men. Jesus. Je ne regrette rien.
* * *
HEGEMONY
Three of my cousins are deaf.
But I have lots of cousins
so the deaf ones
were always in the minority
at the 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
détente. One by one they got married,
each to a deaf spouse. 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 in-laws
and deaf exes 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 among the flying hands,
feeling rather small
and blind, like moles
or voles trembling
in the shadows
of the raptors.
* * *
LIGHT BULB
"I wanna be an inventor
like Thomas Lava Edison," he says,
erupting from the dinner table
and trailing a white dinner napkin
and leaving his untouched mashed potatoes
in the shape of a volcano,
the gravy cooling inside the crater
left by the beaked ladle.
After the chuckling dishwasher dies down
I press my ear to the door of his
laboratory, and I hear his small voice
asking questions and also
answering. Soon he reappears
with two toy cars, a red one and a blue,
parks them on the dining room table,
installs himself in a chair–my chair–
and bids me sit. The demonstration begins:
"I've invented a talking car horn, Dad.
With a menu. You choose from the things you always say
when people cut you off, or move too slow,
or don't put on their blinkers. Only now
they'll be able to hear you." The cars start up:
Vroom, vroom. The red one says:
"Come on, wake up, buddy. Sometime this
century would be nice." The blue replies: "Relax,"
and turns left. The red continues straight: "Nice
turn signal, jerk." He looks up at me with
eyes as big as headlights. "Well, would you
buy it?" he asks, and the cars fly up
and out in opposite arcs above his head,
grind to a halt midair, upside down in his hands.
Paul Hostovsky is the author of three books of poetry and seven poetry chapbooks.
His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily,
The Writer's Almanac, and Best of the Net. He works in Boston as a staff
interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf. To read more of his work, visit him at
www.paulhostovsky.com.
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