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.