The Bookends Review

Staring intently into the mirror
I can see the bones beneath my face,
a rigid armature
that would take
fierce will to break,
architecture that’s endured
decades of menacing weather.

Pressing pencil against paper,
I trace the ridge of cheekbone,
the shadow pooling at my temple,
winding up the long stretch
of my inherited grandfather’s forehead,
to that bulging vein
I blame on my father’s rage.…

...continue reading

Go to the store, collect frozen garlic loaf,
noodles, sauce, parmesan, & meat.
When it’s time to leave,
the self-checkout seems more self-
obsessed than self-aware, less AI &
more I quit. It freezes after the ultimate item,
tells me, Help is on the way,
which feels more self-defeating.
The clerk who comes to my rescue
is stoned out of his mind, staring,
rubbing at his faint goatee. “Sorry,”
he says, “I was mesmerized by your
garlic bread,” then tries to chat
about irrational imperatives of machines.
He’s so friendly I want to invite him
for dinner, see his glasses steamed
by sauce. I sense that he would love
a conversation more.

– Ace Boggess…

...continue reading

I could never sleep in anticipation of my birthday. At dawn, Capri would take me by hand to our coop. “I wonder which hens laid eggs,” I would muse. I watched her duck her pale hands under the hen’s feathery breast, extracting the eggs delicately. I checked the carton of eggs for breaks, surveying the rest of my ingredients.

I started the oven in the morning and buttered the pans. On the counter, I laid out the flour, butter, oil, sugar, vanilla, baking powder, salt, milk, egg whites, frosting, and the metal whisk Capri left behind all those years ago. I sifted the powders into a bowl and whisked them gently. While Capri could crack an egg with one hand, I cracked them with both, my muscles throbbing.…

...continue reading

Nights like that didn’t happen often, when I wandered the dark and quiet streets of an unfamiliar town. But there I was, alone when it shouldn’t have mattered, yet somehow, it did. I trickled along like a slow leak, a notch above meandering; gravity had become a lateral force that pulled me forward.

Occasional streetlamps brightened their corners, but only seconds were needed to pass from darkness to darkness again. Then a blade of light slicing through a tiny window. I thought someone had left it on by mistake but a closer look revealed it wasn’t a mistake, rather a gathering site of sorts, if not the only one in town, surely the only one open. And a quiet suggestion of companionship began to form, just from knowing I wasn’t alone.…

...continue reading

Waste another hour as if back in prison
when the world is elsewhere:
wall & razor made from snow flattening hillsides
with portraits of paleness, clouding roads,
filling in the potholes with despair.

I sleep as I did then, robbing time
from storm’s sentence.
Maybe I dream but awaken & forget.

The white river has come to rest,
trapping me in its natural penitentiary,
binding me with shackles I could break
out of, don’t dare risk my life
on a whim for pizza or sex, a trip
to the store or a concert in a lovely bar
where the pianist plays songs
of siesta, lulling me back to my cell,

convicted of warm-
blooded wanderlust, a weather pattern.

– Ace Boggess…

...continue reading

There was once a man who fell in love
with his own shadow. On a gloomy day,
along the pebbles-paved streets swept by
the sooty drizzle of Victorian London,
a clattering of hooves announced the fast
approaching of a horse-drawn carriage,
with at its reins a man in a black coat
and top hat turning back on the way to
the entrance of the graveyard he had crossed
after he had presided o’er his burial.
There, waiting by the sombre iron gate,
he found a woman with blonde hair
and a black cloth that sheathed her sockets
on which two eyes were drawn with chalk;
she raised her arms to him as he was passing,
and the man had a vision of himself
being thrown down in a freshly dug-up grave
while shovelled dirt was heaping over him,
with the moist scents of the night-dewed soil
imbuing its soft texture on his lips
pressed by the tasting of the woman’s kiss,
whom, as he sluggishly awoke from dreaming,
he found gone, with only the resulting pain
of an unearned oblivion being real.…

...continue reading

I spun the second quarter into the slot, visualizing its journey through the works and gears and levers until it splashed into the metal box deep inside the bowels of the glowing, glorified refrigerator. A magic trick of the imagination.

Sad when that’s all a guy’s got.

Stepping back a half pace, I considered my selections. Choosing a beverage for study hall shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, I did this every day. What I wanted was a Diet Coke. But in the land of macho seniors sporting full beards and beer guts (and that was just the girls!), I had to be careful not to bring undue attention to myself, forced to answer for my wimpy taste in soda.

I usually went with a Coke.…

...continue reading