Someone Else's Grief

I’ve never walked in driving rain
as she does now, the noise so sudden &
vast as to become its own silence.
You’re doing everything right, she says,
although I feel absurd & out of place
as if lighting candles on a plastic cake.
Should I bring you a casserole? I joke.
Isn’t that what people do? Feed the wound?
Replace the body with the spoon?
She says she’s content to have me there
(wearing my serious face, implied).
My instincts tell me seek more information
about what bond was broken, question
what beliefs she & her family called home.

Job Before the Job

The painters my mother hired for her deck
are hammering at boards—
ack ump ack ump ack ack ack.

Not yet doing the work they do,
they’ve taken temporary gigs
as prison guards catching nails

that have made a break for it.
So many have risen from graves
in which they were meant to stay buried.

What is the physics of nail reversal?
Did wood reach its liquid form,
bits of metal bobbing to the surface

like self-inflating life preservers; or,
soggy from rain, did it squeeze them out
like seeds & pulp from ugly fruit?

Perhaps the nails obtained enlightenment,
then, like feathers, fluttered up.
Or maybe these aren’t

the original nails, but replacements
a lazy carpenter slipped into slots.
Whatever the mechanics,

it’s preventing the painters from painting,
which could be the basis for a grievance
they file with their union of two.

October 18, 2025

About the writer

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. 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. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.