Ace Boggess (3 poems)
“What Do You Feel About Grendel?”
—Google autofill
As far as monsters go, I’ve lived with worse—
inside, where clawed & toothed scraped steel together.
I was someone’s Grendel: hungry brute
didn’t expect his prey fighting back with swords.
No point blaming the devourer,
or feeling sorry for him, though I do
as I praise the sandwich that chokes him
with a well-honed bone stuck in his throat.
“What Is Your Idea of a Perfect Poem?”
[anonymous questioner in the audience]
I read Dobyns’s “Uprising” in prison.
Not a prison poem, although the title
sounds like it could be, sounds like
an article one might pass in daily papers—
Uprising at X Correctional Center—
in which guards end up as hostages &
the inmates demand better food, healthcare,
conjugal visits. It’s not about that
or a rebellion in some small Latin-
American country. It’s about death &
how death loiters around the next corner
for all of us, so we should get on up
(as James Brown sang) & free our asses
(George Clinton). It instructs us to strut
through whatever’s left of life,
do what’s needed to feel completed,
maybe happy—that part’s not so clear.
Dobyns, like Thomas, rages in verse,
except he uses the word ‘prick,’
which Thomas wouldn’t, voice
constrained by the tuxedo it wears,
constricted by a frilly bowtie.
Also, there’s something about the Seven
Deadly Sins, those colorful asides
driving through town in their Jags.
Dobyns could be saying do them,
or don’t, or live & try not to worry
about all this supplemental weight.
I’m muttering now, losing my way—
also what happens in a good poem:
it takes you places you didn’t expect,
then brings you back, enforcing vision
by slapping you with a shovel
much like the one Dobyns leaves here
leaning against a wall—you know
what it means. It urges you to escape
this cell, choose a highway,
blind to all the graveyards at your exit.
“What Does Love Taste Like?”
[question asked by Janet E. Collinge]
Milk chocolate wafer in the rain,
that sweet hard melting—musty,
slick. I imagine seaweed & sugar.
The downpour smudges
candy against our fingertips
we lick & suck, & this
is love without sadness of liquor,
frivolous gasping at cigarettes.
We do not say ‘love’ because
saying ‘love’ has a different taste
more dark cocoa sampled as,
thirsty, we cross scorched beach sand,
when we’d rather have rain
to satiate our shattered lips &
soothe brutal burn-ache of our feet.
Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, River Styx, Cream City Review, and American Literary Review, among others. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.