“What Makes You Happy?”
—Facebook info box
Talk, please. My anxieties
from childhood left me
weak at speaking. Tell me
love, death, & bruises.
Share your broken marriages,
nights like a singularity
swallowing suns
you spent in motels
no one knows by name.
Small to big, weather
to the weight of being—
give me more: whispers
around laughter, whatever’s
said in sleep tongue.
I’m insatiable for conversation
when I have none
like the sex addict who can’t get off,
dope fiend who can’t recall
why he ever loved the feel
of dying—it’s touching God,
he says, then pulling back:
how I’d describe this
dialogue across a table
at some dimly-lit café
in a city many miles
from where we are.
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), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. 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.
