RUBIALES KISS

by Paul Hostovsky

They call it football because
you can only use your feet.

Though sometimes you can also use 
your head, your chest, your legs.

But you can’t use your hands.
And you can’t use your arms. 

Those are the rules.

They call it a kiss on the mouth because
it’s a kiss on the mouth.

You can only kiss the mouth of someone 
with whom you are intimate. 

A lover. A spouse. 
Sometimes also family.

Use your head. 

That’s the rule. 
In all countries and in all languages. 

True, it is an unwritten rule,
but that’s no excuse for breaking it.

And now that you’ve broken it, Luis,
now that you’re flaunting it 

and famously showing your contempt for it, 

you can be sure the rule 
will get written down after this.

And though you probably won’t end up
in jail, you just may end up 

giving your name to this kind of unwanted kiss. 
Even without your consent. 

Because that’s the rule with eponyms.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

A CAT WHO LOOKS LIKE HITLER

by Chris O’Carroll

Image source: Cats That Look Like Hitler

Your kitten’s face is white with a black patch,
A toothbrush mustache, underneath the nose.
You named the little furball Adolf, natch.
(You could have gone with Chaplin, I suppose.)
Since cats cleave to no ideology
That one could label pro- or anti-Jew,
And are not really into irony,
What the name signifies depends on you.
It could be just a joke about a face
That seems as comical as monstrous now,
Could be a shout-out to the Master Race
That operated Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  The eponym enjoyed such baneful fame,
  It’s hard to know what’s in a namesake’s name.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in Angle, Folly, Light, The Rotary Dial, Snakeskin, and other print and online journals.