Lunch Date
We barely speak,
sharing space for an hour in the car,
then at a table, masks off at last.
Is this happiness?
Aging together in a community of silences?
We celebrate our understanding of each other’s needs
for food & a soda.
We both believe
we will experience passions of youth
if mouths find no other wants
to sate us, let the day be bearable,
less hungered, when we return
to our separate paths of resistance.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
See more of Ace's work in 11.2 and 1.2 and 4.4