Paul Hostovsky

They looked edible—soft, brownish,
waxy bite-sized lumps in the shape
of my father’s ear canal. “What
are they?” I asked my mother, picking one up,
squeezing it, sniffing it. It smelled like
nothing. Like the nothing my father
had become. “They’re Flents,” she said.
“Ear stopples. Daddy used them
to keep out the noise.” My father had died
three months before. She was cleaning out
his bedside table drawer. I wanted
to keep everything: reading glasses, shoehorn,
pens, pennies, Flents. And it’s only now,
now that I’m the age he was
when he died, that it occurs to me: I was
the noise he was trying to keep out—
thirteen and a half, recently evangelized
into the church of rock ‘n’ roll, playing it loud
all the time on my new Panasonic compact stereo,
while he was quietly dying in the room next door.

Bio

Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Only Poems, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com.