1/30/2017 0 Comments Three Poems by Charlie BriceEmbrace The human heart pumps 15 CCs of blood at a time and that’s how much it holds when it stops We measure everything except the grief of a daughter whose father, Fethi Sekin, was killed by a car bomb in Izmir last week Killed by some zealot who thought he’d save Turkey or purify Islam or purchase his way into heaven with Fethi Sekin’s 15 CCs But the photo in today’s paper is of Mr. Sekin’s 8 year old daughter who does to his coffin what she wants to do to her daddy She hugs it, lays her head against its flag-draped contour, and dreams of the times they’ll never have Happy New Year January 2, 2017 and I go shopping at the Giant Eagle in Edgewood. I buy enough groceries for the 65 million who didn’t vote for Trump, and checkout in Adriana’s line. I ask this lovely black woman, her eyes like languid pools, how she’s doing. Not good, she says, someone stole her wallet the day before Christmas with all her credit cards and ID and overdrew her bank account by $185 dollars. The worst is that her wallet was lifted in the bathroom of Giant Eagle where she works. Her eyes now two cloud-covered moons. I’m sorry, I say, but it will pass and tell her that, years ago, my wallet was stolen from the front seat of my car where I’d left it after I dropped off our son at the airport for his first trip away to college. Evidently my heart and most of my brain flew off with him. I might as well have put a sign on the wallet that said Here, Steal Me, which makes Adriana laugh, and I am happy to give her a little New Year’s cheer. On the way out of Giant Eagle I pass a middle-aged couple. The woman says to her man, You took a long-ass mother fuckin’ nap-- twelve hours! No, he replies, and shakes his head like a wet dog. Yes, says his woman, a long-ass mother fuckin’ nap. I think of all those who stayed home during our last election and didn’t vote. I think of what that long-ass mother- fuckin’ nap cost us all. Election 2016 Our hundred foot oak stately for so long as we could remember governed our backyard with the kindness of gnarled branches that spread gifts of shade in summer, stark strength in winter. Our oak that withstood fence construction ivy infestation generations of kids who climbed its bark and swung from its sturdy limbs. Our oak that survived and endured vicious varieties of Zephyrus’ wrath: scathing sun, freezing rain, dilating and contracting water under its woody skin. Our lovely oak lost two huge branches, one calm and cloudless afternoon, that fell on our old bent locust tree; like a forest of dominoes that locust collapsed, in turn, on our house. Our ancient oak that had given us so much turned out to be rotten inside, a master of backyard trumpery, those torn limbs revealed an empty inner core that left no choice but to take it down. Our precious oak gave way to the tree man’s spiked boots that gripped her creviced derma. Chainsaw buzz dug into my soul’s flesh while her severed and noosed limbs were lowered to the ground. Our oak was no more. We were left with scorched earth, a parched and crooked swale, a hollow stump out of which nothing could grow. Bio: Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst living in Pittsburgh. His full length poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, was published by WordTech Editions (2016). His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Kentucky Review, The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, Chiron Review, The Dunes Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Sports Literate, Avalon Literary Journal, Icon, The Paterson Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Spitball, Barbaric Yawp, VerseWrights, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere.
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