"What Do You Want, You Naughty Boy?" by Ace Boggess

          —subject line of spam e-mail

as body bends a next line forms
tongued into existence

one I must interpret
landing songbirds on our lips

let them sing the happy consonance of ‘p’
the whiplash accident of ‘k’

shush us with ellipses
drag those jagged exclamations down our backs

I want a literary afterglow
to burn our fingers on a block of ice

to misinfer: I want us to announce ourselves
with hard breaks enjambing quiet

we will leave it to readers to determine
how our feet were tangled in our clothes



Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea, 2016). His poems have appeared in River Styx, Harvard Review, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.