Looking Around for Something Dead to Roll Around In

Paul Hostovsky: Looking Around for Something Dead to Roll Around In

Looking Around for Something Dead to Roll Around In

by Paul Hostovsky

Feeling surly and misanthropic on Thanksgiving,

I excused myself from the table

where the gratitude was so thick you could

rip it with your canines, tear it clean off the bone

and carry it dangling and bloody in your teeth

right out of the room.

Then I sniffed around

in an adjacent room for a while and, finding a dead

poet on one of the bookshelves, buried myself

in some sweetly decaying, quaintly boxy poems

for several pages, exulting in the faintly mildewing

historical smell, when all of a sudden

you burst into the room and yelled at me to stop

stewing.

Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023). His poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the Best American Poetry blog. Website: paulhostovsky.com

Cindy Rosmus originally hails from the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, once voted the “unfriendliest city on the planet.” She talks like Anybodys from West Side Story and everybody from Saturday Night Fever. Her noir/horror/bizarro stories have been published in the coolest places, such as Shotgun Honey; Megazine; Dark Dossier; The Rye Whiskey Review, Under the Bleachers, and Rock and a Hard Place. She is the editor/art director of Yellow Mama. She’s published seven collections of short stories. Cindy is a Gemini, a Christian, and an animal rights advocate. She has recently branched out into photo illustration.