Editorial intern Wren Massey on today’s bonus poem: Ace Boggess’s “Gratitude List #13” views memories behind bars, sweet memories of pleasantries with fellow inmates, and the musical desire for freedom in a system designed to ruin rather than rehabilitate.

Gratitude List #13

Forgive me when I praise my wealth
of pleasant prison memories:

the candy man rolling lollipops
with boiled Jolly Ranchers,
gummy snacks, & sticks from cotton swabs;

the watermelon scent of hooch
my first month in—
though I didn’t taste the booze,
it revealed how I was
at a party full of revelers
stripped of their dancing shoes
but not their feet;

dreams during afternoon naps
in which I was free &
could sniff multi-colored flowers,
taste the smoke of grilling burgers,
drive away as if I had won clemency in a raffle;

letters from strangers
who told me we have read your words
& want you to know we are here, or
want you to know that we know that you are there;

card games, chess, tournaments of each,
a bag of Moon Lodge chips the entry fee;

playing the chaplain’s guitar some nights
when I could sing loudly & off-key
as if shouting a drunken hymn for the journey home;

guards’ voices over the intercom:
Please don’t ever play that song again.

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.

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