Gold Medal
What do you think on that podium you’ve
worked all your life to mount, forsook your
youth, the gentle caress of another,
wild nights with friends, midnight
wanton wanderings,
gone forever for this single prize?
You hear the deep sonorous melody, the
anthem of a proud and grateful nation.
You want to return that pride, but
thoughts of Minneapolis intrude—
a city turned to ICE, once Pretti,
but ugly now, no Good.
Don’t you wish you were a curlew, a bird
that can shut off one side of its brain, let
that side fall asleep, close that eye,
while the other half, eye open,
flies to its destination? With half
your brain asleep, you could live that anthem,
land somewhere free, see the half-truth
of who you are.
The warehouse
With thanks to Mary Oliver and Dylan Thomas
In those days NoDoz and Dark Roast cadenced the march
to my mother’s drum. Wyoming Restaurant and Hotel Supply—
the business mother resuscitated after daddy, Guadalcanal
cratered, drank away his one wild and precious life.
Mother ran that business in the way a courageous woman
fighting a male world would: Her word was law.
Transgressions weren’t allowed.
Those were days when I yearned to be sent to the warehouse—
a Quonset hut on the outskirts of Cheyenne that contained excess
glassware, ashtrays, pie-tins, mopheads, used and damaged kitchen
ranges and broken-down commercial refrigeration units.
Also housed in that dank tomb were gallons of DDT, banned
by the government, and buckets of Aerodet, an industrial cleaner
that could remove oil from concrete and hope from a young man’s lungs.
I’d sit on the dirt floor and watch dust motes dance in the scant
sunlight that squeezed through cracks around the rotting door.
I’d fire up a Camel and wonder what would become of me, heartbroken
and scared—sixteen years toward heaven, facing nuns and Vietnam.
I couldn’t decipher the rat tracks scribbled in the dust, but wondered what
its life was like in this dreary dungeon. Where was it going as it scurried
over the culinary ruins and poisons of America in 1966?
The Day the Music Died
We are each the only world
we are going to get.
Jim Harrison
The world spins round and round, the minivan’s
seats float in space, loose in a blister of terror.
One full revolution—I think, This is survivable.
After the second, I’m not so sure.
My shirt in shreds, blood everywhere. Al’s feet
hang over the driver’s seat. Al sang backup.
Three pieces of Hammond B3 organ littered
the median strip accompanied by guitars
in cases, microphones, Fender amps—a sixpack
of Schlitz Malt Liquor accuses us from a ditch.
I open its case and find my floor tom in a strange,
muted shape. Cars speed by on I-25, but I hear
only silence: I hear the gig our band will not play
in Aspen that night, or anywhere, ever again.
No more Dancing in the Streets, no more Knock
on Wood, no more Ain’t too Proud to Beg.
No more Please, Please, Please.
The Apartment
That apartment on Pearl Street in Denver returns
over and over in my dreams. That weirdly
proportioned place: two rooms of equal size,
one a bedroom, one a kitchen. A double bed
and easy chair captured the bedroom space—
not a design of my making, but a convenient
arrangement when bringing a new woman
to my place. We’ll just have to sit together
on the bed—that sort of thing. In my dream
I’m back in that apartment, walls decorated
in nouveau macabre with Gaham Wilson
cartoons I’d ripped out of Playboy magazines.
My favorite: two men with hunting rifles on
a blood-splattered snowy field. The caption:
“Well Lester, I think you got the last of the
species.” In the dream, I’m the last of the
species—a total failure, no Ph.D., no 35 years
a therapist/psychoanalyst, no wife, no son,
still a hospital attendant on the medical floor
of Denver General Hospital. Still emptying
bedpans and taking the hapless to the morgue.
I’m just a big nobody on a blood-splattered
dreamscape who went nowhere. It can take
a good half hour to recover from this dream,
to gather my gratitude, reset reality, rent
a little fortune from the tragedy of life.
*****
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.