Ace Boggess
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
Natural Ink
Apply distilled white vinegar to black mold
behind sheetrock like a monster in the closet.
As six-percent acidity eats, leaving a trail of reddish spots
& shadows, the dark stain resembles the Mothman
in sketches & on book covers. I can’t stop staring.
Pareidolia, matrixing, like noticing ghosts in windows
or Jesus drawn on browned ridges of toast—there’s nothing
supernatural at play, no interdimensional message
of foreboding. Clarity comes from a distance:
the house will suffer more. We confront its future
stench by tinge, or omen. We’re doomed, I joke,
my laughter weakened by the work that must be done.
I Named It Deathbringer; My Mother Calls it Fred
The robot climbs a deep-end wall of the pool,
its brown square rising in blue,
blurry like an optical illusion,
mountain at highway’s end cloaking its shoulders in fog.
It resembles luggage floating up
from a downed airplane,
bobbing at the surface before taking on water to descend.
Technology has advanced beyond my comprehension.
The newest phones snap photos
so acute you can see scars of old wounds on a corpse.
On TV, I turn away from ads for cars that park themselves.
On Facebook: stories about sex machines so realistic
they mimic human emotions & say No.
A friend in her hometown tells me poopbots clean the sewers.
Not much different, I imagine,
than this diligent lump of circuitry
crossing upslope like a tank riding a dune’s edge,
calming to watch like an hourglass
although the sand, once fallen, disappears.