Having Company
is what it’s called when a family our family used to know pays a visit from out of town & stays the night. Food must be prepared. Not funereal casseroles. Barbecue, festive, slopping the plates. Cookies, too, & tea or lemonade. Yet the other family stopped for a meal along the way or else no one is hungry though it’s late. Words take the place of sandwiches, & the evening thrums as if with an early choir outside in the brush. That’s called catching up. Do we even know these people, or they us, saying hello at five-year intervals like pulsars blasting in distant space from which our radio telescopes pick up signals that are never the messages from aliens that we hope whenever we hear the initial buzz that assures us of them coming around again.
- © Ace Boggess 2022
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
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