By Ace Boggess
No hat. Sunburnt, mud-flecked cheeks. He works hard, trimming bushes into elephants, piling leaves, digging a trench by the fence line for his own reasons. “What’s your name again?” I ask. He tells me, & I know him from long ago. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.” He says, “I’m a different person now.” I wonder if he intends the sense of being other than he was back then, having gone through battle, rigor, & rust, or how we are never the way we see ourselves & are seen in dreams— more cowardly or adventurous, thinner, attractive, less haunted, hunted, full of want & magic when the glass has fogged.
Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His fourth poetry collection, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
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