Page 38 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Paul Hostovsky
Poem
When I finally figured it out—
you know, life, the whole thing—
I couldn’t write it down fast enough,
and I was shaking my head in disbelief, smiling at the sheer dumb luck
of each new line revealing itself to me
like a winning scratch ticket, hitting it big,
I mean really big, the kind of big that
comes over you slowly and all at once,
like what it will mean for the rest of your life, how you won’t have to work at it anymore because everything will be different now
and the same. It was a little scary actually, and my stomach started to hurt but the pain was different now—it was part of the joy,
and the joy was different too because
it was unbelievable. I mean I knew it was true, I just didn’t believe it. And that hurt, too. Then the old hurt gave way to the new,
and suddenly everything rhymed a little.
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Hostovsky’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book is Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023). A former contributor to The Woven Tale Press, he works in Boston as a sign language interpreter.