Paul Hostovsky's poems appear and disappear simultaneously (ta-da!). He has no life and spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect disappearances. More at https://paulhostovsky.com/

01.    Taking the Cake

The urinal
cake, that deodorizer
thingy: small, white,
hockey puck-
like, lozenge-like,
lemon Italian ice-
like, deceptively
fragrant
in the urinal’s sceptic
drain, ultimately
irresistible
to the three-year-old
that you were
when you reached your hand in
to take it
and put it in your mouth
while I stood next to you,
not seeing you
because I was looking
blissfully up
at the dropped ceiling,
peeing
the jumbo regular
coffee of the last
rest stop out in torrents,
exhaling contentedly,
feeling good about
life in general
and you and your beautiful
mother waiting in the car
in particular,
not to mention my perfectly
functioning bladder
emptying itself
the way it should,
which always feels
good no matter how
you cut it.

02.     Homonymic

In the dream you said, I love
this time of day,  it’s called the cholera.
I said, I thought the cholera was a disease.
You said, It is a disease but it’s also
a time of day. There was no dictionary
in the dream. We were sitting outside
at a café or a hospital. You asked if I’d read
Love in the Time of Cholera, and I said
I started it once, but never got past the first
50 pages. And you said, That explains it.
I wondered if you meant the book explains
the time of day you love and why it’s called
the cholera, or if you meant something else,
something about me and the way I am, namely,
someone who can’t get past the first 50 pages
of a book you love. Which would mean
something else entirely. And then I said,
I think cholera is one of those words that,
if divorced from its meaning, would make a beautiful
name for a girl. Like Treblinka. You gave me
a pained look in the dream, and I wondered
if it meant you didn’t agree with me or if it meant
what you were eating didn’t agree with you.
Either way it was plain to see you were suffering.