Paul Hostovsky

THROWING SNOWBALLS AT CARS

From our little redoubt
up on the hill
we lobbed our redoubtable

arsenal of white
handcrafted ordnance
one by one over the hedges

and listened
for the gratifying
thunk

on the roofs and hoods of the passing
innocents
who mostly just kept trundling dumbly

along
through the purely perfect-for-packing
driven snow. But once

an innocent in a beat-up pickup
stopped. And stayed there. Idling. Fuming.
We froze, our fingers and toes

twitching. Our hearts racing. Our noses
running. Finally he drove off, but he doubled
back around, and routed our little

redoubt. And there's no doubt
he would have beaten the shit out of us
if he caught any of us—

but we dispersed
like a burst snowball ourselves,
and melted into the neighborhood

like so many scared shitless
snowflakes, no two of us exactly
repentant.


Paul reads "Throwing Snowballs at Cars":



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Paul confesses: "There was a lot of physics involved with this particular favorite juvenile pastime or crime. Things like the nature of free-falling bodies, acceleration of gravity, velocity, mass, inertial frame of reference. But we didn't have the words for that back then, so it didn't make it into the poem."

PAUL HOSTOVSKY is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Hurt Into Beauty (2012, FutureCycle Press). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Best of the Net 2008 and 2009. Garrison Keillor has read Paul's poems on The Writer's Almanac seven times. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com