What Have We Got Going On? by Ace Boggess

—clerk at the auto shop 

someone said the world will end today.

asteroid. solar flare. nuclear armageddon.

many ways to spare the rock &

scrape the meat as cosmic neutron bomb.

we’re not dead yet, so I need brakes

replaced. machines crumble, leave us stranded,

incomplete. uncertain what comes next,

how do we endure without the A.I. of television?

how do we know when to duck & cover?

I’m making deserts from veils of dust.

it’s the end of the world & my car won’t run,

or stop—crunching sound the god of trivialities.

Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—as well the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, River Styx, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.