Two poems by Cindy Sostchen-Hochman

A Partial View of a Six-Month Marriage

Tongues & thresholds. The lovesick groom carries the homesick bride to the smell of Cajun spice, the sound of Caribbean drums. South Florida in October. There's a lizard in the kitchen and dust in my coffee. The fireplace forecasts our future: paper, ash, disaster. The heartbroken dog hangs his heavy velvet head. A fat waitress counsels us over hotcakes & deliberations. The plaster is peeling. You bring me pills & platitudes, spit at my kiss-less face. Love marks itself absent while Lust pleads the Fifth. Someone strikes a match and we lay like two dull sticks in the hiss & glow of another spiteful night. Next morning we talk over strangled eggs & bacon. El Niño wets the bed, predicts more storm.

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Overtime (or, I Gave at the Orifice)

What do you call this feverish hour when even the walls are wet with sweat and spackle, when playboys and poets are dropping their clothes and facades in electromagnetic fields, when tongues are winding counter-clockwise against the grinding of hearts, and mouths are clinging to the loverless dusk, and what do you call it when morning comes dressed in a suit, poker-faced against the winking of dawn, and breath returns to calm and fingers no longer smolder? When all of last night’s hunger is best hidden in mundane drawers of Briefs and Leases, revised and saved under mistress moonlight, when the poet should be nestled tight and warm in plaid pajamas, and the artificial Adonis should be safe in his rightful bed, counting his blessings.


Editor's note: A Partial View of a Six-Month Marriage was previously published in the Brownstone Poets Anthology 2010.


Author bio:

Cindy Sostchen-Hochman is a resident of Brooklyn, New York and is employed as a legal assistant to a divorce attorney. She is the co-host of the Green Pavilion poetry event, a contributing book reviewer for Coldfront Magazine and the Associate Editor of Thin Air, a weekly poetry cable show in Manhattan. Her work is forthcoming in the New York Quarterly, Writing Outside the Lines, and a poetry/music project involving Shakespeare's sonnets.