​Hugh Behm-Steinberg

When My Wife is Really Upset, Mel Tillis Comes to Me in a Dream and Tells Me What to Say

If there is a strategy on how to stop and keep stopping, you stop stuttering when you sing, the strategy is to keep singing no matter what, when no matter what is enormous you want to stutter, sing anyway, hum a little, whistle like a bird, like you swallowed a key, a teakettle, a master of ventriloquism, throw your whistle, get so good nobody knows you’re the one who’s whistling, make the walls whistle, the floorboards whistle, happy songs, happy songs, the kind you sing when your lover bites a piece off of you, and if you still have to stutter at this point then you need to sing some more, sing to your lover, the one who falls in love with your whistle, the one whose mouth holds your whistle, who has so much to say he’s just rocking on the floor, as you sing without stopping, without stopping honey honey honey now, honey won’t you open that door?   




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Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, forthcoming December 2012). His poems can be found in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, dirt, Ditch, Nap, Forge, Swerve, Thrush and Zeek, as well as a few places with more than one syllable. Hugh teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.