Issue Thirty-Seven - Winter 2021

Moviegoers

By Ace Boggess

It’s about forgetting
what’s beyond your few feet of space.

Does it make you laugh? Think? Cry?
Cringe gripping the armrest of your seat?

Find an emotion. Share it.
Take a friend, lover, someone

to whom you normally wouldn’t speak.
Take a stranger. Take your mother.

Take the drummer from Poison.
Have companionship & isolation.

It’s like chatting online
without all the tedious information.

Let the score ripple, narrative
find poetic voice even if monotonous.

The dialogue? It loves you.
Sound effects? They, too—passionate.

Nothing here’s superfluous to want
of escaping time. Your job, debts,

lack of sleep? Absolve them.
Let this be a version of your life.

Copyright Boggess 2021

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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