“the dollar in the wishing well” by Paul Hostovsky

Expensive delicate boat
with a hundred chances on board
floating above the drowned brown
pennies with their one chance each
piled on top of each other
on the abject bottom

shivers, wavers, turns
over, capsizes and the green
president goes under and in
god we trust and all that fancy
acanthus leaf
amounting to a wish
that was taken for granted
yet is not granted

(drawing, Mathemetician by Jody Stadler)

 

Paul Hostovsky, has long and generously contributed poetry to r.kv.r.y.  His poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac; and published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review‘s Muriel Craft Bailey Award in 2001, as well as chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, and Split Oak Press. He has two full-length poetry collections, Bending the Notes (2008), and Dear Truth (2009), both from Main Street Rag. Paul’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 13 times, and won one once. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind.