GAS Featured Poet: Ace Boggess

 

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

“How Will We Know When It’s Over?”

 

                               [question asked by Pat Eskins]  

 

 

When circling buzzards cease to swarm

          above empty dining halls & bars

along the gray city’s gray, blank streets;

 

when masks fall without animosity 

          into the art of a next historic movement

recorded on cell phones instead of canvas;

 

when passersby on the sidewalk no longer wince 

          at muted rumbles of a dry cough

(could it be so?);

 

when music returns, & bands slapping

          their funky sounds from instruments,

a live mic before an audience; 

 

when there is dancing—slow-dancing,

          feverish, frantic, feet-burning-

the-dancefloor dancing, wild & pagan; 

 

when scientists have finished their rite

          of communion

converting the masses to a safe religion;

 

when men & men & women & women whisper

          across the recently silent sheets

that love is the great contagion—

 

we will say Ah ha! as though we found time

          frozen underground & cloned it

from cells of its still-sweet marrow,

 

loosed its replica, saying Resume, life! Resume, 

          customer service! Resume, companionship!

pretending all is well as if all is well.

“Who Will We Be When We Take Off Our Masks?”

 

                               [question asked by Karen Van Kirk]  

 

 

Alive, a word that comes to mind,

but what about the secret face

laughing, sardonic, for months?

No one observed our expressed derision,

except as eyes tell stories—

some loud as if in neon,

others mutterings of a mountain saint. 

There we were with our judgments,

mocking through a veil like brides

plotting arsenic for their husbands’ wine.

 

Can we return to the rictus of a smile,

the straight lips of no revelations?

We must retrain our muscles

lest we resemble monsters,

the world so full of monsters

as to be a monster dormitory.

Alive means brutal self-

fulfillment. Our smiles always were

the lie we told to others for their ease.