“Why Does the Dove Wait So Long to Get Out of the Way?”

[question asked by Steve Hoffmann] 

Death approaches

from the left

uphill &

from the right

around a curve.

Something

will kill you:

lightning, a bullet,

cigarettes,

saturated fats,

meteor,

the ice-cream truck.

No point

adding worry

to the warm strut.

Why waste

what’s left

of a life?

Might as well

be a pigeon,

might as well

be a rabbit

in the brush.

Ace Boggess is the 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.