Photo of Earth from Mars

          my house is an atom in a karat of topaz.

          want to say I see it, but that’s the face of Jesus on white toast.

          lots of things to look at, though: the color blue & the color rust,

          frame of jags at the new horizon—not mine

          which seems close enough I could cross a hill & walk

          to another world, the rover’s like a line in beach sand

          observed through one of those collapsible spyglasses

          from a vessel at sea. back to Earth—well,

          not back to it, never having left—back to the image of it.

          has a way of bringing us Earthlings together.

          though I can’t see me, there I am, & there’s my neighbor

          staring out her window, fretting about lateness of the postman—

          he’s with us too in the cerulean portal, & old men

          playing dominoes at lunchtime, convicts & wardens,

          the guy selling weed on Nancy Street, my poet friends

          across the country in California, bunched

          with Russian hackers, desert jihadis, even Tom Cruise

          hamming it up in our portrait as ever. We’re elbow to knee,

          hand to cheek, one, complete—blood invisible,

          skin all blue when seen from way out here.

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018). His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, 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.
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