“What Will I
Need to Do for My Daughter
When She First
Gets Out of Prison?”
[question
asked by Lena Mae Hanft]
She will have stories, as America has stories,
with no one to receive them.
At times bleak, others comic,
they unravel the fabric
from a center not as hardened to time as appears.
They must be allowed to walk the yard in daylight,
shared, revealing the secret prisoner,
secret America. Who wants to hear
what outsiders, disbelieving, would call horrors?
To her: integral scenes
in the narrative of a life
like what happens in a college dorm
or among cubicles at customer-service centers.
She will say this is her America.
Listen closely to its anthem distinct from yours.
Receive it without need to sing along.
One expert says we’re entering a third wave;
another, the second—
virus all around us, virus
singing softly like a mother
about to drown her babies.
The anger I experience
watching television or
walking through a supermarket
wields a rusty knife, might
kill me first.
I’m in a constant state of
panic—
you can’t see it, or couldn’t
if you saw me, hiding in my room.
There will be an election
soon
to determine how America
proceeds.
I’ve voted by mail-in ballot.
If the virus gets me between
now & then,
at least I know the dead will
have their say.
Crickets
Creepers set their ringtones loud,
bounding through the house
like hyper kids refusing to
take my calls.
Their point of entry is a
mystery
I’d solve, but nature picks
too many locks
as with the virus. On TV
today,
news the President’s son has
caught it.
Not the obnoxious one or the
oft-
disrespected; the young,
silent boy
we forget exists because of absence
from perception—like the
virus,
like crickets keeping their
distance
in shrubby ampitheatres at
night.
The insect hardcore band will
thrum, &
I must play my instruments of
percussion.
Ace
Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming
from Brick Road Poetry Press). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly
Review, Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, River Styx, and other journals. An
ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Dramatic and compelling poems, as always from Ace Boggess.
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