Three Poems by Charlie Brice

Embrace

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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