Vol. 1 / Issue 1
Une revue littéraire et culturelle bilingue
Vol. 1 / Issue 3
Philosophers by Ace Boggess
I miss discussing existentialism
with friends around a table
in a smoke-filled corner of the club
where we sipped oil-slick coffee &
named the sorcerers
whose books of conjuring we read.
The bar is gone,
cigarettes banned & frowned upon
by the lips they dangle from.
My friends, too,
have taken their coffee with them
as they’ve fanned across a continent.
What of the philosophers?
They were dead before we started,
lost to their ideas.
Some like Berdyaev wrote beautiful words
few will read.
Others like Sartre said too much to be believed.
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.