Ace Boggess

“WANT YOUR OWN SWIMMING POOL?”

                                                                                               

                              [spam e-mail]

                                            

Open a box & there atop this accident of found art,

the soft cyan shines off two Polaroid snaps,

electric bands of white shimmering

from water’s movement in the blaze of beach light.

I look to be four or five—a time my parents were together,

though even in these photos they are not together.

In one, my mother, wearing a speckled bikini top,

holds a raft the orange shade of sherbet while I climb on,

hunched from stairs at the shallow end,

strapped to my back some kind of float like a cartoon rocket pack.

The next, my dad holds the raft while I grimace at the camera:

rock-star smug, squinting, bottom lip extended like a giraffe’s.

Dad wears his dark glasses in the pool—what a bag of cool

he must have carried with him in the 1970s,

his black beard giving him the look of Serpico

or the husband losing his mind in The Amityville Horror. 

Ace Boggess is author of two books of poems: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press: 2003). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.