Four Poems & Five Haiku by Charlie Brice

 

Switchbacks

 

There were days when we hiked the Rockies,

navigated switchbacks, hauled backpacks,

tipped a wineskin at 9,000 feet.

 

I open the door for Paula, my wife’s physical

therapist, and tell her that she’s arrived at the

most glorious moment of Beethoven’s 9^th

where an ode to joy opens a world of hope,

 

opens a soaring glow drunk with fire. Poor

Paula, I might as well be speaking German,

not talking about Germany’s greatest composer.

She’s probably thinking, Oh god, why can’t I

 

 just walk into a house and start my routine? Why

do I have to deal with some overweight codger

who wants to gouge my gord with classical

music? I take her to our porch-room where Judy

 

sits in a wheelchair. I say, I’ll turn off the music

and leave you two to your torturous machinations.

On the flatscreen Riccardo Muti conducts

an orchestra and chorus. I turn him off just

 

as the chorus gears up for that blissful finale. I’m

grateful for Paula. Her skills might make my wife’s

last years more bearable. Hell, I’d put The Troggs

on the flatscreen if it would help Paula help Judy.

 

At daybreak the smell of pine surrounded us.

At night the purling river played a lullaby.

The stars were so bright.

 

Farther

 

When they carried him out of our house, the color of his sunken cheeks sparked in me a lifelong interest in lividity. The bottles he hid in his desk, the linen closet, the kitchen cabinet, and under the driver’s seat of his car birthed in me a romance with booze. Those car rides when mother forced me to help her dig him out of a Cheyenne bar produced in me a bone-dry weariness. I once tried to call him “coach,” but he wouldn’t remove the cigarette from his mouth in order to catch the ball I threw. In school I constantly misspelled the word father, always put an “r” where it shouldn’t be: f a r t h e r.

 

 

Daddy

 

Did he ever want something beyond

the booze? Did he ever aspire? He

lied on the marriage certificate with

his first wife. He was 16, not 18.

 

She was much older, an angry, racist, woman.

 

They had a daughter, my half-sister.

He walked out on them while the baby

was still an infant. Left them with nothing.

 

What did he want when he married my mother?

Did he ever aspire? He drank all the time.

Is that all he wanted?

 

I was thirteen when they carried him

out of our house. His purple face had

an odd expression. He looked perplexed.

 

Death is a puzzle no one ever solves.

 

 

Trains

 

That gap between the depot platform

and the first step onto the railroad car:

kindling to ignite childhood nightmares.

 

Would the gap suck me under, its mighty

jaws chew my tiny body to bits? Was

that how I filtered into darkness daddy’s

drinking, mommy’s screaming?

 

Once inside the car its rhythmic rocking,

soothing clicking, sent me to the womblike

safety of no outside.

 

Still, there was only one direction available,

only one boarding place, only one destination:

the terminal.

 

 

Five Haiku

 

In winter my heart beats

louder than the frozen earth

Spring seeds wink and smile

 

Hare tracks in deep snow

wind cold and sere slaps my face

So much life in death

 

Leaves crunch under foot

crispy smell of furrowed earth

Morning hides the moon

 

Withholding your love

lips puckered and chapped

A dead rose knows pain

 

Winter walk tonight

two deer appear/disappear

Invisible wings 

 

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.

 

 

 

One Poem by Andrew Shields

 

My Bleeding Heart

 

I woke up and my heart was gone.

I heard the door slam, so I threw on my clothes

and followed the trail of blood down the stairs.

 

It wasn't in sight, but the drops were still there,

despite a misty morning rain.

My bleeding heart was beating fast.

 

The hole in my chest was empty and numb

when I saw my heart just turn a corner

and run into the street where a boy had his hands

 

in the air and was backing away from a gun:

"Don't shoot!" he called and he called, "Don't shoot!"

My bleeding heart was standing its ground

 

but fled when the final shot was fired.

Was it the blood of the boy or my heart

that I tracked through the afternoon into the night?

 

I saw it again in a suburban street

going up the steps to a room above

a two-car garage by a storybook house.

 

The girl in that room was too big for the chair

beside her childhood desk, so her legs

were sprawled across the floor in front of her.

 

There were traces of powder on the mirror

she'd used as a kid for her dress-up games.

My bleeding heart tried to take it all in,

 

but her faraway gaze was as slack as her wrist.

It felt for a pulse that was faint and fast,

then fled before the final breath.

 

The trail of blood grew dry until

I saw it shimmering fresh on a path

that led through the woods to a trailer park.

 

The full moon shone on aluminum roofs,

and a candle was lit in one of the windows.

Through the dirty glass it flickered

 

on scraggly hair and hands on a face,

a pistol on a checkered tablecloth.

My bleeding heart would have reached for the gun,

 

but the hands of a soldier are trained to be faster,

and this was the night when the sounds he kept hearing

were silenced by one final shot.

 

How can I follow the growing trail

of so much blood? At dawn I saw

my heart go up the steps of a church

 

and open the double mahogany doors.

But when I got into the dimly lit nave,

where had it gone to? The pews were all empty;

 

the Bible on the pulpit was open

to chapter and verse for the coming day.

My bleeding heart that never prays

 

appeared beside the altarpiece

and sat down beneath it as if to wait.

The ever-brighter stained-glass colors

 

played over it and the floor of the church

until it vanished into the light,

its beating still there at the edge of hearing.

 

I fell to my knees; I fell asleep

and dreamed of the congregation's voices

singing to my heartbeat's rhythm

 

and interrupted by a man

who'd made as if it come for solace.

My bleeding heart awoke in my chest,

 

and I awoke again, the door

unslammed, no trace of any blood

on rug or stairs or stoop or street.

Andrew Shields lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong" was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album "Somebody's Hometown" in 2015 and the EP "Défense de jouer" in 2016. His poems have recently appeared online in Talking About Strawberries, Delta Poetry Review, London Grip, and Oddball Magazine.

 

Mastodon: https://mas.to/@AndrewShields

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrewshieldspoems/

 

Five Poems by Mark Young

 

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

 

I am looking for a dozen or

so depraved artichokes so

I can spice up my dinner, but

all I can find are a few celibate

onions in the bottom of the

pantry that are well passed

their best-before date.

                                       I ring

the local equivalent of Uber

Eats to order something else

for dinner, only to be told

that the Department of Trans-

port is having a crackdown

on the permissible speed of

e-bikes & it will be an hour

& a half before they can get

something to me.

                               I head out

to the garden to see what's

there, but the fruit bats have

laid claim to the fruit trees, &

the snails & slugs & any other

ground-hugging beings have

taken over the garden.

                                         I go

inside, take out the Larousse

Gastronomique. Read it for a

while, then go to bed, hungry.

 

Tour toys

 

He was a victim
of exponential
decay, measuring
his life in half-
lives, in the hope
that Xeno's paradox
& the concept of 
infinity might some-

how let him live
linear longer.

 

A line from Liza Marklund (2)

 

She paused in front of a shop

window showing a selection

of candle holders & candela-

bra that cast shadows on each

 

other. It made her feel like she

was in an Escher drawing. A

man with bleached hair came

up beside her & said that "the

 

mirror image is likely to be some-

thing other than the subject that

is reflected. It might be a curve

on the Epstein surface or polygons

 

colliding on a staircase. Depends

on the distribution of monomers

in a coating of grafted & absorbing

polymers. Prepare to be amazed."

 

His words, & that Escher effect, kept

her company all the way home.

Sparks in the brain that did not

end until she shrugged off her coat.

The Unspeakable Foundations of Reason

 

Reasoning that
it would keep the
ants away, he built
his new house
on a base of
compacted aardvarks.
Completed without
a problem; but barely
two weeks after
moving in, he wandered
out to the kitchen
one morning
& found ants
swarming over every-
thing. He was struck

dumb. 

 

Mirroring is a real thing

 

Eating asparagus can affect the physi-

cal traits of your urine. It's not some-

 

thing that is grown in the garden. That

is another kind of green pee & is spelt

 

differently. Spelt — also known as dink-

el wheat — is a kind of relict crop, once

 

grown widely but now confined to a

much smaller area. Urea is odorless &

 

colorless, is the main nitrogen-bearing

component of mammalian urine. Urine

 

is not sterile, but talking about it can

sometimes be useful in breaking the ice. 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty-five years, & is the author of around eighty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, non-fiction, & art history. Recently published books include Balance, from Neo-Mimeo Editions, Nualláin House, Monte Rio, California & From the Cave’s jukebox, from Sandy Press, Santa Barbara, California. 

Mark Young's most recent collection, synecdoche, came out from Sandy Press in mid-April.