~ Delta Poetry Review ~
Who Will Lead Me, or About
This?
Broken doe limps along,
willing to live through suffering.
Last night, a coyote
was spotted in the neighborhood.
My mother obsesses about its menace,
though at her age, she won’t be
camping in the back yard soon.
On TV, the man
hired to rain fire on the world
shrugs as if to say, "Maybe I’m qualified."
The O in oracle isn’t an O;
it’s a hole we fall through
seeking our future.
I read how an ice shelf Delaware-
sized will break off Antarctica
any day, or in fifty years.
I want it solved without my involvement—
is that an American thing to say?
Coyote slinks behind nearby houses,
searching for sustenance &
a quiet, empty space to nap.
The Pills
They were contracts with serenity,
writing their liens against my skin.
They helped let silence in, song.
I miss them, not like faraway friends
I might visit if I find the time,
but like the long-dead grandfather I barely knew.
I miss the scent inhaled, although I can’t recall
it.
I even miss straying fragments
for which I crawled, hands searching
orchid carpet—sometimes
finding pleasure, other times a rock.
Why nostalgia for snakebites;
gunshot wounds? Brain denies;
body records: membranes burning
after I sniffed a jagged line of dirt.
Airplane
Man tried to burgle her dad’s house; made it past a gate or two
before one of the dogs scared him off. Now she’s panicking,
afraid of the reset button when the sneak thief tries again.
I offer comfort, reassurance, but she’s having none of it.
What if the burglar breaks the perimeter?
What if he kills the dogs? What if my father can’t handle it?
Her head spews worst-case scenarios like dyes leaching from a new shirt.
There’s always a worst case: what we can’t prepare for—
one unlikely chain of events that will pick every lock on a memory
fence.
Reminds me of a joke I heard about the guy who won’t fly
because the plane might crash; and won’t ride the train
because the plane might fall from the sky; crash into it.
No way to unbend logic-yoga with numbers or reasoning.
That plane could be dropping from behind a cloud right now,
guaranteed to find us inside Walmart, Burger King,
her second-floor apartment. 747s stalk us.
I reassure her that her father has a German Shepherd;
criminals stay clear of those. I describe how convicts line up
against a wall to be sniffed; searched. Then, it’s four paws
on the bedding, bag of clothes, unopened commissary.
Becomes a battle of wills: prisoners fearing; hateful,
dogs roaring as they march, trained to sit in silence at a scent.
I tell her some inmates, given warning, sprinkle pepper on the floor
or leave out opened bags of chips—one to enrage the dog,
the other its handler. Funny, sad, cruel.
She doesn’t care about my stories. Stories don’t help.
Neither does my calm voice cracking under the strain of telling.
We both have bad guys coming up behind us, skirting our defenses.
We have airplanes with our names on them chasing us
as if unmanned drones. We want to hide out in sanctuaries
of our heads—those first places monsters always look.
Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018). His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Rattle, and past issues of South Carolina Review. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison.
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