What color do you see when I say Donizetti?
This question lingers. This question torments.
I visit Flint, my boss. This is after his family says he suffered a mental break. It is during the pandemic. His family thinks Flint is a bit selfish to have an emotional collapse when medical resources are stretched thin. Yet despite the pandemics, the failure of democracy, the power outages, the collapsing economy, he is installed in a private room in a sanitarium. A vintage 20-volume print set of the Oxford English Dictionary is delivered and set up on bookshelves. Since his mental incident, Flint’s eyes lighten as if they reflect a fading sunset. His family says the medicines affect the pigment in the iris of his eyes. My doctor says she knows of no medication that does this.…
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It wasn’t until he’d decided to kill himself that Joel Barkley gained the relief meds and booze had failed to provide. Fading fast was the guilt for having laid off the employees at his floundering art gallery. Ditto the night sweats over his landlord’s increasingly loud threats to put his “shit out in the street.” And, as always, there was his dysphoria, still there, but content to play third fiddle to more immediate concerns. In their place, he contemplated the “how” (swallowing a 45 hollow point) and the “where” (his parents’ stately home). But it was the “when” – a party celebrating his mother stepping away from a lucrative 35-year career shrinking the heads of Charleston’s upper crust – that brought him more peace than hearing Goodnight Moon as a child. …
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Staring intently into the mirror
I can see the bones beneath my face,
a rigid armature
that would take
fierce will to break,
architecture that’s endured
decades of menacing weather.
Pressing pencil against paper,
I trace the ridge of cheekbone,
the shadow pooling at my temple,
winding up the long stretch
of my inherited grandfather’s forehead,
to that bulging vein
I blame on my father’s rage.…
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Go to the store, collect frozen garlic loaf,
noodles, sauce, parmesan, & meat.
When it’s time to leave,
the self-checkout seems more self-
obsessed than self-aware, less AI &
more I quit. It freezes after the ultimate item,
tells me, Help is on the way,
which feels more self-defeating.
The clerk who comes to my rescue
is stoned out of his mind, staring,
rubbing at his faint goatee. “Sorry,”
he says, “I was mesmerized by your
garlic bread,” then tries to chat
about irrational imperatives of machines.
He’s so friendly I want to invite him
for dinner, see his glasses steamed
by sauce. I sense that he would love
a conversation more.
– Ace Boggess…
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I could never sleep in anticipation of my birthday. At dawn, Capri would take me by hand to our coop. “I wonder which hens laid eggs,” I would muse. I watched her duck her pale hands under the hen’s feathery breast, extracting the eggs delicately. I checked the carton of eggs for breaks, surveying the rest of my ingredients.
I started the oven in the morning and buttered the pans. On the counter, I laid out the flour, butter, oil, sugar, vanilla, baking powder, salt, milk, egg whites, frosting, and the metal whisk Capri left behind all those years ago. I sifted the powders into a bowl and whisked them gently. While Capri could crack an egg with one hand, I cracked them with both, my muscles throbbing.…
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Nights like that didn’t happen often, when I wandered the dark and quiet streets of an unfamiliar town. But there I was, alone when it shouldn’t have mattered, yet somehow, it did. I trickled along like a slow leak, a notch above meandering; gravity had become a lateral force that pulled me forward.
Occasional streetlamps brightened their corners, but only seconds were needed to pass from darkness to darkness again. Then a blade of light slicing through a tiny window. I thought someone had left it on by mistake but a closer look revealed it wasn’t a mistake, rather a gathering site of sorts, if not the only one in town, surely the only one open. And a quiet suggestion of companionship began to form, just from knowing I wasn’t alone.…
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Waste another hour as if back in prison
when the world is elsewhere:
wall & razor made from snow flattening hillsides
with portraits of paleness, clouding roads,
filling in the potholes with despair.
I sleep as I did then, robbing time
from storm’s sentence.
Maybe I dream but awaken & forget.
The white river has come to rest,
trapping me in its natural penitentiary,
binding me with shackles I could break
out of, don’t dare risk my life
on a whim for pizza or sex, a trip
to the store or a concert in a lovely bar
where the pianist plays songs
of siesta, lulling me back to my cell,
convicted of warm-
blooded wanderlust, a weather pattern.
– Ace Boggess…
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