Shopping on Day Seven of the Statewide Lockdown by Ace Boggess

Look at you groping soup, sodas, meat, dairy.

How much you touch: cart & goods, key fob,

credit card, pockets of your cargo pants.

Brushing tops, collecting agents,

lifting a loaf of bread or thumbing fruit.

Might as well splash virus like a body spray

as if trying to attract an attractive mate

to bite your head off in the afterglow.

---

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. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

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