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  • Issue 24
  • Septuagenarian Flashback by Bruce Boston

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Septuagenarian Flashback by Bruce Boston

Septuagenarian Flashback by Bruce Boston

Illustration by Sue Babcock

Stumbling into the humid
jasmine-scented dark
from a midnight cinema
playing an iconic art film 
rife with sidewalk cafes

and laconic actors whose
monochromatic silences
confabulate to a toxic 
conundrum of pale angst
and lost existential loves,

my venerable thoughts 
segue to foggy mornings 
in a metropolis by the bay,
wandering the slantwise
streets of stoned youth

and the fleeing tendrils 
of a Guatemalan high,
a great golden bridge
aglow with the blurred
headlamps of early traffic

rising out of the mist,
glittering like some fabled 
and fantastic behemoth 
that would carry me to 
a chameleon tomorrow. 


Bruce Boston is the author of more than fifty books and chapbooks, including the dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale and the psychedelic coming-of-age-novel Stained Glass Rain. His poetry has received the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, the Gothic Readers Award, the Balticon Poetry Award, and the Rhysling and Grandmaster Awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, and twice been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (novel, short story). www.bruceboston.com

Tags: Bruce Boston, Poetry