Poetry from Ace Boggess

Photo: Robert Zunikoff

I Watch a Drug Deal Happen

by the dumpster. Don’t mind me. I’ve been where you are,
holding twenties cupped in my crooked palm,
pleading hurry. That orange bottle looks familiar,
filled with tickets to the show you’ve seen before.

But why the Chihuahua? The long red leash?
I don’t remember needing props to make the handshake
easier. Watch how she sniffs the milkweeds
glazed with dandelion gold, how she pretends

not to notice you squeezing the cap as if fighting the lid
on a jar of pickles. How weak you seem, pleading
for your feast. Desire expands like hunger, need,
until you’re less a master than the beast.

.

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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.