Issue Thirty-Five - Winter 2020

“When Did You Decide Not to Give Up?”

By Ace Boggess

[question asked by Nadia Ibrashi]

let each day decide what’s best for a broken beast

like me, like anyone shackled to one existential crisis

or another. why choose breath when the murderer

wraps his meaty garrote around your throat?

could cease, sleep, discharge your sentence.

if today has other plans—a walk in the rain

beneath arc lamps sparked like hazy stars,

a laugh, a kiss, a few kind words from strangers—

I permit these tour guides to lead me through the present,

won’t invoke them or ask the route, preferring surrender

to the next armed struggle with police.

where the squad car takes me, I will find release.

Copyright 2020 Boggess

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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