More Thoughts after Visiting the Closed-Down
West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville
ACE BOGGESS
Ghosts the guide discusses like memories—
who’s to say what’s psychic photograph,
what paranormal, spirit orb, ectoplasm, rust?
The dead remember the dead.
The dead hum dirges for themselves,
chant litanies, adding their names to the list.
The state’s impenetrable warehouse
now a shrine to retribution—is it haunted
from more than nine hundred murders,
or what claustrophobia we, free guests,
smuggle into ominous lines of cells?
When the façade of brown so Gothic & vast
comes into view, we focus, fail to notice
the looming Native burial mound
across the street—the one for which this town
was named, why no cartographer instead
inked Prisonton, Consburg, or Murderville
on a map along the Highway of Lost Souls.
Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His fourth poetry collection, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.