The Affair of The Foreign Tongue
We thumbed pages by candlelight,
muttered weak attempts at words,
assumed dramatis personae
as tragic players stroking skin like a prop,
fingers lingering at sides.
I wish I remembered names of the German poets:
spirits that escaped
through us, our bodies, vocal cords.
Our mouths made noises like grunts of delight,
faulty syllables, mispronunciations.
We needed no translation,
lines seducing though they could’ve been
uncompromising notes on the glory of war.
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.
