PAUL HOSTOVSKY's Unlikely Loves : German
PAUL HOSTOVSKY : Get Well Card in Cardiology
WARD KELLEY : The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine
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German Get Well Card in Cardiology The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine  
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PAUL HOSTOVSKY's Unlikely Loves
German
I thought it sounded strong, impressive, Germanic, to say: "I have to go to German now." I imagined my friends all staring admiringly at my back as I walked industriously down the tessellating hallway to German, my posture slightly straighter, my rucksack slightly heavier with Dieter and Petra inside dialoging about Bratwurst and Goethe and Turkish guest workers. I could recite "Der Erlkoenig" by heart, and my r's were perfect drum solos. Nancy Baum sat in the seat in front of me and pretended not to hear when I whispered: Ich liebe dich into her umlaut—that pair of moles on her left earlobe. I thought it sounded romantic, Germanic, productive as a cough. Frau Spier thought so too, for she asked me to repeat it for the benefit of the whole class. Nancy's earlobes blushed then, and her umlaut looked like two watermelon seeds. Later that semester I translated one of Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus, the one about the tree and the ear. My translation employed an umlaut where no previous translator had ever thought to. I thought it was brilliant, subtle, Orphic. I published it in our high school lit mag and waited. I waited twenty years. Then, suddenly, there she was in front of me again, with her back to me at the reunion, lifting a mixed drink to her lips with a slender ringless hand at the bar, the umlaut right where I'd left it. I whispered: Ich liebe dich, and she turned around, the wall finally down, smiling a smile as wide as East and West.
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German Get Well Card in Cardiology The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine  
POETRY requires a mature audience ENTER only if you are 18+ under 18? GoTo Games

PAUL HOSTOVSKY
Get Well Card in Cardiology
The beautiful nurses of history are all out in the corridor, nursing. If you push the call button their beautiful voices will ask you what you want. If you tell them you want them they will give you their beautiful laughter and a gentle rebuke. If you keep on pushing the call button they will send in the plain nurses whose voices are also beautiful to confuse you. If you close your eyes and just keep on pushing the call button for all it's worth they will take the call button away from you. The world is like that. What you need is one of those crazy great ideas men get when they're in love, the kind that just might work, the kind that makes a man great and gets him the woman. History is full of crazy great ideas. Borrow one. You can do better than pushing your call button and pulling your catheter out. Very mediocre ideas, my friend. You just keep on imagining all day every day of your convalescence the beautiful nurses of history lining up in the corridor outside your room, and you will get better soon, because history is on your side, and exercising your imagination is not only good for your heart, it's good for God and country. Repeat after me: I pledge allegiance to beauty.
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German Get Well Card in Cardiology The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine  
POETRY requires a mature audience ENTER only if you are 18+ under 18? GoTo Games

WARD KELLEY
The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine
I cannot compel myself
to make reason of her.
Why does she squander
so many hours of each
finite day, so many hours spent
ministering to dead persons?
She prays most of the day
to people who are dead,
saints of this odd sect . . .

She should bestow this time
on me, give me this ardent
attention. For I can surely
fulfill the role of saint; I can
give her answers to any
question she might ask
about living and dying.
Certainly an emperor
knows more about these
shades of man and woman
than a dead person, and I
could make her body
feel much more riveted
than any stirrings that words
of prayer can provide.

Yet . . . I fear her stubbornness
whispers to me how all our gods
are now dead -- our gods who lived
forever and received our own most
piercing, but misplaced, desires to live
forever with them . . . our gods!

So now, do all gods, once so omnipotent,
fall dead somewhere in the progress of time?


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German Get Well Card in Cardiology The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine
German TOP  German ©  PAUL HOSTOVSKY's Unlikely Loves  .comment1
Get Well Card in Cardiology MID   110POEM2 ©  PAUL HOSTOVSKY,  .comment2
The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine] BTM  The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine ©  WARD KELLEY  . Catherine of Alexandria, (circa 213?), was a Roman Catholic saint, whose beauty so impressed the Roman Emperor Maximian that he offered to overlook her refusal to sacrifice to the gods if she would only submit to his desires. Catherine rejected his overtures, saying she was already the bride of Christ, and even converted the fifty philosophers Maximian convened to change her mind. The emperor beheaded the philosophers, then attempted to have Catherine broken on a spiked wheel, however it miraculously shattered. Instead Maximian had her beheaded, yet when he did, milk flowed from her severed neck. Where this tale was highly popular in the medieval West, most historians think it is probable Catherine never existed. Joan of Arc, though, did not concur with such skeptics; Catherine was one of the three saints Joan claimed appeared to her to offer advice in her military endeavors.
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