By Josh Boardman
How to describe that human face the broken neck stolen from its original placesetting and fitted onto a new pair of shoulders. The lowered ears and the narrow mouth and the Aquiline nose of Roman Empire. Crowsfeet around the eyes and a receding hairline and the defined slash above the chin so like a man who is accustomed to barking orders. The sculpture in all can be divided into three parts, the first of which constitutes the form of the face its boundaries and the space it inhabits, another the features, and those which in his own language were called the sentinels of the highest place of the body, in ours the eyes, the third. Of the first the massive borders reach from our shins to a few windowslats short of the ceiling and from ear to ear the width of a human wingspan. The ponderous skull is supported by a pick of a neck which bears a winding slice that looks like a river dividing provinces or a scar that has birthed from the throat of one man an idea—one lopped off then reattached to bodies of new marble as generation after generation lopes on like lemmings into the present. The complexion has tarnished over time from porcelain white to a tawny brown that blotches the chin and cheeks where millions have fingered the blessing of Caesar. The second part the features are encountered in threequarters view and from the peon’s position beneath the head they resolve themselves somewhere to the left and behind. Who hasn’t in their childhood looked up to their father as he placed a hand on the sink gazing out the window or turned away to the faraway distance of Judgment and Consequences as he focuses his attention on the negative space of thought. But the third part the eyes betray the inhumanity of this thing which appears a man but is actually an idea calcified into stone—pupilless cut from slab and undiscerning grey. They understand nothing. They occupy a solid skull focused someplace in the negative space of thoughtlessness (as is ascertained now in our humanity) and at any moment it might snap its supports and roll down on the frail bodies that love it, crushing us. Objective and possessing a thirst for violence that can be slaked no better than a rock that says I’m thirsty.
Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the Colossal chapbook series (2024-5), Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018), and the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His work was shortlisted in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, selected as a finalist in the 2024 Fugue Prose Prize, and his stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Juked, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is working on his second novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.
He is the founder, owner, and operator of Hewes House, an organization with the aim of elevating aspiring writers.