Life Is a Banjo

Just ask the banjo players

and they’ll tell you

they didn’t choose the banjo

so much as the banjo

chose them--and now

they carry it around with them,

this conjoined twin

whose big round head,

pale skin, funny-looking

fifth tuning peg like a misplaced

thumb halfway up a forearm,

is part of them. Like

the body you didn’t choose.

Like the life you didn’t choose either.

Nobody gets to choose.

But you pick it up, you

dust it off, you put your

arms around it and you try

to love it. And you try to make it

sing. You get yourself

some fingerpicks and you

pick that damn thing like

the life you didn’t pick

depended on it.

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. Website: paulhostovsky.com

As It Happens

When they told me I was dying, which I wasn’t,

I began to miss the things in the world which I didn’t

even like about the world--the hideous traffic

on 95, for instance, which I found myself sitting in,

going nowhere on my way home, in no hurry now

that I was dying. I will miss this traffic, I thought,

feeling surrounded--girded--by people and life and

desire in the lanes. And the truck, the 18-wheeler

shouldering in, trying to pass on the right (I always

hated trucks), struck me now as a vessel of human

kindness, people helping people they don’t even know

by bringing them food from far away. I will miss

all the trucks, I thought, as I rolled down my window

and waved him in, and gave him the I-Love-You sign.

I will miss the waiting, the fuming, the inching

along, the reductive bumper stickers and caviling

crazy drivers with their chutzpah and their daring.

And the road itself, which is every road, everywhere,

bending, unfolding, continuing on. Then I turned

the radio on and the talking heads were talking

about death--all of the deaths at home and abroad.

And I thought to myself, the living are talking about

dying but the dying are talking about living. I am talking

about all the living I missed already, all the living

I wanted to do--any kind of living at all--now that I was

dying, which I wasn’t, as it happens, as it turned out.

Coconut

Bear with me I

want to tell you

something about

happiness

it’s hard to get at

but the thing is

I wasn’t looking

I was looking

somewhere else

when my son found it

in the fruit section

and came running

holding it out

in his small hands

asking me what

it was and could we

keep it it only

cost 99 cents

hairy and brown

hard as a rock

and something swishing

around inside

and what on earth

and where on earth

and this was happiness

this little ball

of interest beating

inside his chest

this interestedness

beaming out

from his face pleading

happiness

and because I wasn’t

happy I said

to put it back

because I didn’t want it

because we didn’t need it

and because he was happy

he started to cry

right there in aisle

five so when we

got it home we

put it in the middle

of the kitchen table

and sat on either

side of it and began

to consider how

to get inside of it