Statewide Lockdown, Day Twenty-Eight by Ace Boggess
Full cycle of the moon we’ve been at this in West Virginia,
some states longer, others not enough. Four weeks,
twenty-eight days, six hundred & seventy-two hours
(give or take) of hiding, sheltering out of rational fear
of infection. Not much compared to four hundred &
twenty thousand hours of preferring not
because the world exists, & people in it with emotions,
judgments, looks, words, but I never kept worries of death
in the anxiety pocket of my cargo pants. I shiver
as if a copperhead nests under my bed. I can’t see it—
mean, vigilant. Kroger’s has deadly scorpions loose,
ignoring arrows, skittering down the aisles.
The pharmacy shoots darts tipped with tree-frog poison.
Even my girlfriend, who never leaves her apartment,
births black widows on her tongue. It could be true,
could be not. I don’t believe it, do. Twenty-eight days
of walking past graveyards at night, alone
except for the whispers. I had to use a calculator
to write this poem. There were other numbers
I could’ve chosen: days in prison, days on drugs & off.
I stopped because I couldn’t figure out how
to enter dread plus dread & get a sum.
Numbers can be negative, irrational, or an infinite string
after the decimal. I choose my numbers carefully:
forty-two thousand dead, twenty-six of them here.
So far, I’m not one of them. One:
the number of tries it takes to get that wrong.
June 15th, 2020Ace 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—and the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many 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. His sixth collection, Escape Envy, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press in 2021.