two poems, by Ace Boggess

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Who hasn’t met Van Gogh on a road of flowers

or wept upon seeing a severed orchard?

Oh, but the colors! One dreams brightly

in big spaces, vivid as watching

atomic blasts or volcanoes erupting

on YouTube. There’s one of those,

too. Or both. Or both as one.

All of us dream we must run

from danger, feed a demon,

stop philosophizing & create.

These dreams bear weight of myth,

all imagined taken as tangible

in a terrible world of woe. I awoke

from this story a caring man.

Dune: Part One

Frank Herbert’s birthday is the same as mine,

October 8: my first thought

as I’m watching the latest adaptation

of his sci-fi masterpiece.

I want to shout it to everyone around me

as though it holds some key

to an understanding of the film.

Coincidences lead to fascinating trivia,

I guess, or else religions—

a part of the story I anticipate

that won’t be reached until Part Two.

It’s politics in this one—

schemes on top of schemes.

I know what’s coming, choose to focus

on the stunning cinematography,

images of spaceships, deserts,

worms with mouths like porcupines.

The actors work their magic,

too, helping us to forget

we’ve been here before, suffered,

experienced, & grown into our own

meek, mysterious versions of minor gods.

---

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.