by Ace Boggess
I dreamt my old boss into being. Twenty years invisible, & here she came, her unimpassioned face, stone jaw, tone flat as if mediating some dispute.
She approached, said something I don’t recall that wouldn’t have been cruel but left me wanting to punch the nearest wall in my dream. I awoke angry, frustrated,
remembering. How does the subconscious work? Why do I conjure the past like summoning spirits? Why her? She’s not the boss despised back then, like me another passenger riding the Misery Line.
I should release her from my buried cage. Maybe that’s the point: to make me better by lessening the rage weight. It can be a burden. It squawks a warrior’s yawp in times of peace.
Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His fourth poetry collection, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
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