The Commodore
Dave, the self-described Commodore of Walloon Lake,
taught my wife to sail. Although he was a famous
philanderer, I trusted Judy, my wife of twenty years,
to raise the mainsail, unfold the spinnaker, and fend
off any unwanted wantonness of Dave’s. As for me, I was
and am a landlubber, interested only in the metaphorical
seas of Murdoch, Eliot, and Coleridge. The Commodore
tried, one blowy afternoon, to launch his sailboat from
the sandy haven of our shore, but wind roared, gusts
arose, and his beloved vessel took off without him. Judy,
already aboard, yelled through the gale, Jump in quick! Dave
howled Ahoy! and hoisted himself over the stern. His graceless
scramble must have angered Poseidon, for his swim trunks
lost their moorings, slithered down his legs, twisted themselves
around his quixotic ankles. While my sweet wife steered Dave’s
boat to a safe harbor, she got an unavoidable glimpse of the
Commodore’s rudder as he struggled against wind and randy
urges to raise his jammers to a cromulent level.
Another Contact High
Marijuana mist vapes
over the asphalt
and into my nostrils.
Another contact high
at the supermarket
parking lot.
A lady gets out of her car,
moves as if in molasses,
her shopping list
a heap of hieroglyphics.
Shoppers bereft of carts
wait for the young guy
whose gathering them
but who’s laughing so hard
at a weed-induced private
joke he forgets where he is.
Why have so many given up on consciousness?
Sunsets
and marigolds
await
clear
eyes.
The Body
Those were the mornings
up north, when mist danced
across the lake like sprites
made for beauty beyond betrayal.
We’d moved there
to get away from
the sirens and gunfire,
robberies and murders
of the cruel city.
They found the body
in a ditch only half-a-mile
from our lake house.
His wife had a new boyfriend—
didn’t want the hassle
of divorce, popped him
five times with her 22
in his truck—dumped him
in a culvert on Keeble Road.
They never found her gun.
She and the boyfriend tossed it
over the Mackinaw bridge
on their way to a bedbug motel
where they spent themselves
on middle-aged fantasies
and bargain basement gin.
She grew up with the man
she killed separated by a few
yards of cornfields and two-track.
They played hide and seek,
they played tag and post office—
they kissed behind the linden tree.
About the Author
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.
