Ace Boggess
"Have You Ever Loved Someone and Still Felt Lonely?"
[question asked by Jennifer Hall-Farley]
Sitting hunched on a stone bench,
lulling in dark, surrounded by it &
crickets hopping on their unoiled pogo sticks,
I have my cigarette, &
I have the harvest moon—
a flash in the sky like staring
into the barrel of a pistol as it fires.
Smoke chokes me, invites me to awaken.
The moon has a face,
but I stare at it & see colon-
asterisk-semicolon.
The moon knows punctuation.
The moon knows less about endings,
dragging on in its detachment.
I was like that once: hoping
for a kind word, a hand to hold,
a memory making itself from dust.
My sighs could fill the pages of a novel.
~
Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
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