Issue Twenty-Seven - Winter 2016

Letter to M. on the Occasion of Her Second Engagement

By Ace Boggess

last time I wrote you an engagement poem
a celebration of the possible

I might as well have sung a ballad
while I shoved you down the stairs

or emblazoned your photograph
on the cover of Sports Illustrated

so you broke an arm
before you took the field for your next game

this time I give you
not a word in praise of fidelity

turn from these lines
before they blaspheme with their tenderness

like one of your bridesmaids smiling boldest
to disguise the murder in her heart

Copyright Boggess 2016

Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—as well the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, River Styx, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, and 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.

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