dr. fauci AUTHOR Ace Boggess Has the perfect bedside manner for informing a hundred thousand people they will die in weeks. Brain tumors, cancer clusters, rats eating their inner organs— nothing anyone can do, unless everyone does it. Brutal honesty, yet sincere & soft in his pronouncements like a mother telling her child there will be no Christmas gifts this year. When he says many might pull through with faith ful social distancing, it’s easy to believe him, his voice reassuring he isn’t caught up in magical thinking. He acts as though he waits with his patients in ICU, holding their hands, saying goodbye, wishing a happy journey. No father of death, he adopted— watch him teach that rotten boy respect.
Ace Boggess is an author of five books of poetry including Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many 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. His sixth collection, Escape Envy, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press in 2021 Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash.
28 | APRIL 2020
