Charlie Brice - Issue 36

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His tenth poetry collection is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

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Autumn Comes Too Soon

My fingers, old and stiff, drag

letters across a page.

Today, a cool breeze while summer

hides behind a cloud.

Thousands turn out for curlews 

in China. Winged hope.

Notes skitter lake-skin. The song 

fades but the melody lingers.

The ocean growls, returns us

to our birth bed.

In love my heart beats too fast,

so much like worry, like fear.

The only one for me chose another.

The empty shore starves.

The only one for me wilted like

a flower—my worm’s eye view.

No matter how many times you hear the

song I Will Survive, you won’t survive.

Credo

I believe that the best alternative 

to suicide is the play of light and 

shadow on sycamores in October,

that peace, while elusive, can be 

found in the rubble of war, and that

life can be flabbergasting—how 

did cruelty become a political virtue

and kindness an attribute of ridicule?

I believe that hope is something best

exhibited in the eyes of a ten-year-old 

boy at the ballpark, and that driving 

while digging into my pockets to find 

change for the crack-thin man on the  

corner enacts the toil of charity.

I believe that loving a drunken father

and a bat-shit crazy mother can both

destroy and create a soul, and that 

a heart is more than a pump.

It is my belief that petting a puppy’s

tummy makes going to heaven unnecessary.

I believe that there is but one true sentence:

Thou shalt not kill.

I believe that Chopin’s nocturns construct 

a canopy of calm that shelters the universe.

I believe that my last breath will be enough.