Ace Boggess: Noise

sit by the phone that never rings

awaiting whatever silence follows silence

a black cat shrieks unheard from the street

while a lime-green truck shreds linings of its brakes

there’s disparaging thunder in some other distant place

wind cursing gods & rooftops of the world

new lovers bellow in delightful agony

while regret deep-throats its mantras for tomorrow &

still the phone that doesn’t ring doesn’t ring

still the stillness of losing oh that lost art of the lost

Ace Boggess is a freelance writer and editor living in Charleston, West Virginia. He is the author of three books of poetry: Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Lumina, Mid-American Review, River Styx, Rattle, North Dakota Quarterly, and hundreds of other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. But that’s another story.

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Copyright 2017 Ace Boggess. From Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.

First published in Connecticut River Review