Five Poems

By Charlie Brice

(FB: @ charlie.brice)

The Green Chair

It was my father’s pleasure throne,

where he sat, ringed in smoke,

Bud in hand, laughed at Sid Caesar

and Red Skelton, watched the Yankees

play the Game of the Week, the Saturday

Night Fights, and Ed Sullivan on Sundays—

that living room chair where Bon Bon, our

little poodle, pressed against his chest, licked

his chin, and swooned in ecstasy, her eyes rolling

to the back of her head out of love.

Into that same overstuffed chair my mother, beset

by rage, pushed my drunken father, sotted after

nine o’clock as usual, and watched his eyes roll

into the back of his head then forward toward

his nose and cross.

“Ward! Ward!” she screamed, metamorphosed

from a shrieking hate-filled banshee fisting my

father’s chest to the Catholic schoolgirl he married—

imbiber of communion and confession,

the conniver who yearned for heaven.

At ten, my sanctuary was in our basement,

the hi-fi, Dvorak’s New World, the grassy

hills of his Largo Theme—notes that

danced across my worry and skittered

like leaves across a wind-worn prairie.

My mother called an ambulance. Later, she

forced me onto her bed, trapped me there, while

she swore to God she’d never hit my father again.

My stomach tightens at this memory, even now,

seventy-two years down the raucous road of life.

Let It Be

Avidis Zildjian made his first Cymbal in 1618,

but I discovered Zildjian Cymbals because

Ringo chose them to adorn his Ludwig Oyster

Pearl drum set with its speed king bass drum pedal.

I bought that exact drumkit in 1966, paid

for it from proceeds earned while percussing

with our little garage band, The Rogues.

I can still smell the chrome polish when I

opened the boxes that housed those surfaces

that let me survive my mother’s rages and my

many broken hearts. Now those drums sit

in my music room across from my study on the

third-floor attic. Their Hey Jude days embedded

in my yesterdays. Those kick beats live in my body,

twist and shout their way through my arms, legs,

and heart, but not on the drum set anymore. Too

many friends are tormented by tinnitus, something

that terrifies me because of all the music that treacherous

tone would destroy. A philodendron and Boston fern

bookend my drumkit now. Dead and curling leaves reside

on the snare drum and on the floor in front of the bass drum.

The picture is one of a fall, the fall of a life.

Last night, Frankie Curran, long dead, visited in a dream.

I asked him if he remembered the cadences we played

for the St. Mary’s High School Marching Band. No,

he said, and looked startled. You taught them to me,

Frank, I said, and proceeded to play the first one

I’d learned on the stretched flesh of my sadness.

The fall of life wilts everything. I live now

in a marcescence, waiting for the wind

to unfurl the curl. And yet

the beat endures,

it goes on.

My First Rodeo

It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

Ken Kesey

Janice reminded me of a dour, though

pissed-off, coyote—the kind that would

lope along the desert like a depressed

marsupial then lunge at some unsuspecting

vole and gobble it in one gulp.

Janice hated men and, since I was unmistakably

a man, she made our time together

a living hell except, of course, in bed.

She was a wildcat in between the sheets,

had the endurance of a Brahma Bull.

I rarely lasted past the regulation eight

seconds before she bucked me off,

but the five or six or seven seconds

were worth it. And just to illustrate, once

again, that you can’t tell a cow

by pulling its utter, Janice was deeply religious.

She insisted that our bedroom frolics

take place only on Friday nights. That

way she had to endure the threat of eternal

damnation only until Saturday afternoon

confession. She was a fervent member of Saint

Belinda the Bewildered’s church on

Carey Avenue in Cheyenne, but her

most devout devotion was to her patron saint,

Saint Jan the Humiliated—martyred

in the fourth century A.D. in the most gruesome

fashion. They immersed her in a primitive

Roman version of a deep fryer when she

refused to renounce her religion. St. Jan’s

courage and convictions were admirable,

but when my Janice demanded that I loan her

the money to start her St. Jan’s Fried

Chicken and Fish franchise, I took my

stallion, so to speak, and rode off into the sunset.

I guess our love wasn’t meant to be.

Persistence

That monkshood Judy planted

still stands in late November,

poisonous to eat,

but beautiful to look at.

It persists, spreads its purple cowls

across our garden, blends

with umber hydrangea leaves

watched over by our bare service berry bush,

but it’s the persistence I want to emphasize:

those purple blooms survive despite

freezing temperatures, our first snow,

and the wall of water dumped on Pittsburgh

by Hurricane Nicole—it persists like

Judy persists, seven months of recovery from nine hours

of surgery, arthritis, come rain or shine,

radiating through her body, yet

there she is, every morning,

dressed as if painted by Renoir,

framed by her wheelchair,

cooking her eggs,

pouring her juice, and later,

writing poems that sing their lilting melodies

into every corner of our home—poems that

make me and even the floorboards smile.

The View from Here

Boodles, his gray furry body nudging

my pen, blurring my words in feline love.

Mugsi on our porch, frozen in poodle

posture for pursuit, the wait for a squirrel

to leap onto our locusts, our oaks, our maples,

trapeze from branch to branch, tease in tyranny.

Monkshood abloom in November as if Van Goth dappled our garden in purple

and added hydrangea leaves, umber, larger than a man’s ear.

Bereft of leaves and blooms, our service berry bush

watches, in silence, proffering perches for chickadees,

blue jays and redpolls who peruse our feeders

from its twigs, distance offering safety as usual.

The sun on this fall afternoon, lending its soft light

to blanket our yard in its milky sheen, makes me

think of how hard it will be to leave this airy sacristy, the marvel of a quiet

Tuesday afternoon in Pittsburgh, on planet earth, listening to Chet Baker.

About The Author:

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize.

His sixth full-length poetry collection is Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022).

His poetry has been nominated three times for both the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.