Shopping for Beds on a Snowy Evening

Paul Hostovsky

 

We take off our boots

to try on the bed

at Sears. It's a little too

public with those teenagers

climbing the Stair Masters over there,

that large family arguing

in Spanish among the refrigerators,

this sales clerk in his pimples

hovering above our headboard,

spouting dimensions, promotions, double

entendres. We lie here in

traffic, love and a frank

mischief in your eyes. "We'll

take it," you tell him and clamp

your mouth on my mouth

and we start to roll around as

a hundred humming appliances

praise the king

size bed as big as a boat

you just bought for us

for a thousand dollars, the sales clerk

swimming tactfully away on his clipboard

to ring us up.

     


Paul Hostovsky's poems appear widely online and in print and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.  He has two poetry chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (Grayson Books,2006) and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (Riverstone Press, 2006).  He works in Boston as a sign language interpreter.  More of Paul's poetry is at: www.paulhostovsky.com.

 

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