Ace Boggess
Svetlana Wants to Chat
—subject line of a spam e-mail
Tell me about the war.
Has percussion at a distance
taught your ears the melody of a single note?
Here, we have differing music.
This is my guitar. These
my clumsy fingers on the strings:
fat, short, errant, safe in the noise they make.
Are you shivering? Do you feel nothing,
or are you like a woman who torments herself
with pins, welcoming each jab of hurt?
You’d prefer to be lost in conversation,
but words are a viper’s fang-like eyes.
Caution, Svetlana.
Don’t let too much of the world out there come in.
About the writer:
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.
Image: Epiphany by Rachel Renaudin. no medium specified. No size specified. By 2019. By permission.
