*

Benjamin Ostrowski is a current PhD student studying Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. He has poems published in The Gyroscope Review, Blue Muse, weirderary, The Dark River Review, An Anthology of Emerging Poets, and The American Journal of Poetry. With his father, Steven Ostrowski, he has published a collaborative chapbook called Seen/unseen. Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, painter and songwriter. In 2009, he won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Award for a single poem. In 2017, he won The Atlantic Road Prize for his long poem, After the Tate Modern, which will be published as a chapbook by Island Verse Editions in 2018. He has published four previous chapbooks, and his work appears widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He teaches in the English Department at Central Connecticut State University. These poems are part of a collaboration between father and son:

Hanoi, Vietnam

Steven and Benjamin Ostrowski

Hey Pops, good news:

I feel an old expression spun on.
Tired legs chopped up sautéed mixed basil in
Pumping heart of Hanoi’s French quarter, sided with
Sticky rice that arrives in a basket
And gets rolled into clouded bundles that
Cannot choose which of my fingers to
Cling to (left then, right, back to left now).
This is the second floor
And I can feel the worn bits
Catching new light (in the noodled Pho)
(A study of new light being conducted in the street).
These streets buzz and hub bub with horn honking by
The streetside Bahn Mi,
And the restaurant at the meeting of Hang Ga and Hang Non
Is lodged tightly between its neighbors,
All books in the shelf keeping
Dust off each other’s covers.

I have trouble
(Iron—clad rubble, iPad tunnel)
Picking which novel.
A freckled newt was clung the ceiling and wall
Of the room and
I could not decide if I could sleep with it there,
So we both gathered dust.

I suppose then that Pops the good news is
Spread thinly over sprout fields,
Popped up from water ponds for a
Hungry nation.
The gaze of a child tattooed
Devilish garden watching from a flaky pulpit
Is stretched bed sheets, hungry bugs shiny shells crittering,
Catching light of the ricecart brakelights burrowing deep night
Who pedals past.

There is:
A flat—foot woman with smiled wrinkles fixing motorbikes,
My small brain trying to keep to itself.

1. Old Lyme

Bud, I’m helpless over the distance
that gapes like a huge unfurled paper map
but can’t disunite us.

Atoms of you whirlybird in my veins.
They make me think I could lift paternal wings,
Atoms of you whirlybird in my veins.
They make me think I could lift paternal wings,
fly east east east, make sure you’re safe,
smile, fly back.

***

I’m driving along the privileged beach roads
of Old Lyme, playing Beatle songs for cheer
& chiming in on the choruses. Mostly
I’m trying to figure out
the math of the trees shaking.
I picture premonition breezes taking off
across steely Atlantic’s summer—heated waters,
stirring depressions into hurricanes.

There’s only one cloud in this sky;
it hovers over the Sound
like a gorgeous bruise.

***

Many times in my own life
I’ve been damaged into beauty.

I hope the beauty you find in the
so—far east,
when and if it hurts, heals
even better.

***

Math. It was my worst subject.
The terror of its exactness.
The high probability of being wrong.
Unmerciful nun—eyes cursing at my brain.
I wish they’d taught it closer to the heart:

Problem:
A father missed a son
who travelled 10,000 miles.
The father drove slowly
down Goose Neck Road
until the water made him stop.
He got out of the car
and stretched and squinted
through glare and blown sand,
his bones murmuring
the body’s prayer.
At the same moment, the son
ate sticky rice in Hanoi, mind sparking
one billion times per second.
Deep eastern newness bubbled
beauty in him every time he blinked.
Solve:
What degree of love translates
fathomless waters into pearls of light?

_________________________________________

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