2 poems

by Ace Boggess

After So Long Among Shadows

Second Spring in the virus song.

Seasons of worry, seasons of anger,

now this brightest bloom.

No statewide stay-at-home shutdown

this year, & everywhere 

yellows swirl like pools of light.

One tulip has been bleached white.

The japonica, first time in years,

doesn’t smudge its lipstick in a block of ice.

There is no virus in the garden,

but life we struggle to maintain 

although fleeting amidst

battering wind & pummeling rain.

Could be no beauty without entropy.

Creation is the power to destroy.

News of the Laughing God

News of a killing, news of the possibility

of war in the warming new year.

Death increases its odds again.

Death smells like dust cooking

on the TV I watch for news 

of the possibility of war, news

a god will save us from our self-

fulfilling destiny of death & death, &

I’d rather be tuned in to a much-

loved sci-fi movie about war

elsewhere, death elsewhere—escape

to otherness of lights, colors, sounds

not real. Truth comes in the night,

reveler drawn to the wrong address.

It brings news of a killing, news of possibility

we built a bomb out of silence,

turned the TV cameras on to catch 

the saving god who laughs & points 

at fire as if a funny thing

happened on the way to Armageddon.

Ace Boggess is the 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, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.