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Three Poems, Rich Boucher


Sign of the Good Eye

Took a while, but I finally found someone

who would do it, who would make

a homemade sign for outside my door

that reads no war or violence permitted in life

which is the first sign that came to my mind

after the no solicitors sign we’d ordered came in.

Since that sign we asked for worked so well,

I figured it was worth a try to see how strong

a sign can be. How potent. Magical, even.

The next sign will say no speeding at all ever

anywhere in the world and I’ll mount it right

below the other several signs by my door. The change we want to see: two inches by

six inches of black plastic and mountable

with double-sided tape. Tape that clings firmly,

like I have been doing to some little hope.

Home Improvement

Dollar bills keep pouring out

of the kitchen faucet every time

I go to fill the sink for dishes

or to fill up the water bowl for the cat

and concerned a bit I sure am right now

because not only there should be water

coming out where the money is coming in

but the city, the city that leaflet-yells at us

about how much water we use in the summer

the city that has kind of a police force problem

the city where some of the hardest working people

are the everyday folks engaged in criminal enterprise,

I wonder if the city will find out somehow

that I have constant dollar bills on tap here;

it’s been happening since about ten a.m.,

a lot of dollars, a lot, a stressing mayhem.

I wouldn’t have noticed this

if I didn’t have the day off and now

my lady and I have had, sadly,

to swear each other to lover’s secrecy

and hope that this doesn’t last

and hope that this lasts long enough

for us to get a couple of things

we have been wanting around the house.

The dollar bills flow so fast

from the faucet. You can’t even believe it.

It’s a pale, sage-green breeze

coming out of there; listen,

you have to promise me

you won’t tell anyone;

I’ll get you whatever you like

just please just

shhhhh.

Overnight Sensation

My girlfriend thinks every old white man

she sees who has a bit of gray in his hair

(or who has a lot of gray in his hair)

(or who just has salt-and-pepper hair)

and a trimmed white or gray mustache

and who looks to be in his ‘70’s or ‘80’s

is Stan Lee, the famous comic book writer.

While Stan Lee is widely known to wear

a pair of dark black, difficult-to-miss eyeglasses,

the men she points out to me all over town

don’t even need to be wearing vision correction

for her to shoot me the look, for her to believe

we’re having a celebrity sighting over here;

her only requirement is they be six feet tall

or nearly so and be white and have a mustache,

and even on these matters she’s growing

increasingly open to discussion and flexible.

She does this to me all the time, this fun game,

when we’re out in public - that quick,

surreptitious leaning in very close to my side first

and then the carefully-timed whisper:

hey, look - that’s Stan Lee over there,

and when I turn around to see for myself

I’ll inevitably find an older man

who, yes, happens to be white

and who, yes, happens to be sporting a mustache

but those will be the only criteria

the individual in question will satisfy;

I have seen so many different kinds of Stan Lees

because of her: overweight Stan Lees, redneck

Stan Lees, dwarf Stan Lees, biracial Stan Lees

in overalls, Stan Lees that have full beards:

I’m starting to think from here on out

I’ll need to start bringing one of my old comics

with me for an autograph just in case

she turns out to be right on one of these occasions.

And then other times I realize I have nothing

at all to be worried about, because her concept

of what Stan Lee really actually looks like

continues to broaden and diversify:

hey, look - that’s Stan Lee over there

I heard it again the other day,

and this time when I turned to take a gander

I couldn’t find the comics icon anywhere,

and there was only one person in that aisle

in the supermarket at the time:

love, are you talking about that Asian-American

woman in the motorized shopping cart? Every trip to the market for bread and milk

has become a spy caper with absolutely nothing at stake,

no danger to anything but our sides from the laughing. She tells me to hold on and be cool,

so she can ask if a picture together

wouldn’t be an imposition.

 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His poems have appeared in Cultural Weekly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Soft Cartel, Gargoyle, Gravel, The Nervous Breakdown, Apeiron Review and Menacing Hedge, among others, and he has work forthcoming in antinarrative journal, MoonPark Review and Your One Phone Call. For more, For more, please visit richboucher.bandcamp.com. He loves his life with his love Leann.


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