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Poem from The Bad Guys featured on
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

U-Haul

Garrison Keillor read “U-Haul” on National Public Radio’s
The Writer’s Almanac
on July 30, 2015.
“U-Haul” is from The Bad Guys by Paul Hostovsky. © FutureCycle Press, 2015.

I was glad to. After all,
it would be just him and me in the cab
together for eight whole hours,
talking. He’d been away at college
for four whole years, text-messaging
every now and then, and now
I expected some full sentences.
That was the deal. In return
we’d use my credit card and I would drive
him and all his worldly possessions
home. Somewhere around Delaware
the mirror on the passenger side
starting turning inward against the wind
and I couldn’t see, and it wouldn’t
stay when we opened the window
and readjusted it. I told him
to take off his shoes and give me his laces,
and I’d pull over and tie the mirror
to the antenna to keep it from drifting.
He asked me why his shoes and not
my shoes? It was a good question,
the kind of question you might debate
in a sociology class in college
if you were still in college. But we were
speeding down I-95 in a U-Haul
with one functioning mirror, a resourceful
father at the wheel, a credit card
in his pocket, his thumbs keeping time
to an old-fashioned song in his head
that only he could hear, and a son
drowning out that song now, turning
the radio on. Loud. Louder. Silently
bending down to untie his shoes.

“U-Haul” by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.

 

Garrison Keillor read “Rebound Banjo” on National Public Radio’s
The Writer’s Almanac
on August 22, 2015.
“Rebound Banjo” is from The Bad Guysby Paul Hostovsky. © FutureCycle Press, 2015.

Rebound Banjo

She left him for her ex
who played the 5-string banjo
in a bluegrass band and whom
she’d left for him—and not
three months before—for a short

sweet-smelling spring,
wound him like a string around
the tuning peg of her index,
touched him and he stiffened,
and he sang. And he broke

down and wept when she went back
to her banjo-playing ex
like a second thought about
a second fiddle, a repeating
chorus or refrain. So he went out west

to forget her. But he couldn’t forget—
he saw her everywhere, saw her hands
in the hands of strangers, saw her hair
on the heads of strangers, saw her breasts
in the shapes of the Grand Tetons

high against the big Wyoming sky
at twilight. And on a side street
in Jackson, he saw it in the window
of the pawn shop, its slender neck adorned
with mother-of-pearl inlay,

its fifth tuning peg indented like
a new paragraph, a new chapter,
its pale full-moon face a blank
slate. And he bought it for fifty bucks
which included the case, capo, strap, three

fingerpicks and a Mel Bay’s Learn to Play
the Five-String Banjo book. He was
motivated. To win her back, of course.
And of course he didn’t win her back.
But he did learn to play in a frailing way

“Cripple Creek” and “Old Joe Clark”
and “Sail Away Ladies Sail Away.”

“Rebound Banjo” by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.

 

Garrison Keillor read “Gauguin’s Grandson” on National Public Radio’s
The Writer’s Almanac
on October 26, 2015.
“Gauguin’s Grandson” is from The Bad Guys by Paul Hostovsky. © FutureCycle Press, 2015.

Gauguin’s Grandson

was named Paul Gauguin,
too. He was an artist,
too. He lived in Denmark
in his grandfather’s shadow
all his life. And he chafed
against that shadow.
Like living under a rock—
a rock as big as the biggest
island in French Polynesia.
He painted only insects.
Insects that live under rocks—
beetles, ants, centipedes,
pill bugs. In a later period,
he painted only his wife Marta
in only her long black hair
and horn-rimmed glasses.
Toward the end of his life
he made hundreds of collages
of orthopterous insects—
katydids, mantids, cicadas,
crickets and grasshoppers
with long hind legs for jumping,
or you could say, flying;
and for making a rasping, chafing
sound, or you could say, song.

“Gauguin’s Grandson” by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.

 

Garrison Keillor read “Spiritual Mom” on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac on December 4, 2015.
“Spiritual Mom” is from The Bad Guys by Paul Hostovsky. © FutureCycle Press, 2015.

Spiritual Mom

Mom got spiritual in her late fifties.
And we really had no patience for all
the forgiveness. It was disconcerting
the way she’d kneel down on the floor
in the middle of the conversation
and hug the dog, whispering affirmations
into its long ear, stroking and folding it
inside out like a pocket. When she emptied
her bank account and gave all the money
to whoever asked, wandering around downtown,
reaching into her purse to offer whatever
her fingers touched first, it was the last
straw. We did an intervention, as they call it
in the field of addiction. We sat her down
and confronted her on her spiritual habit.
The room grew quiet as Mom wept softly,
her eyes searching the floor for what to say.
The silence was terrible—even the dog
cocked its head in that doglike listening way
for some kind of affirmation that Mom
had heard, and understood, and would cease 
her spiritual ways or at least be in the world
a little more, no longer walking around like
she didn’t have a colon, with one foot in Heaven
and an ear to the hot little mouth of God.

“Spiritual Mom” by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.