New Poetry by Charlie Brice

Love

You can smell it in the folds of her hair

or maybe in the steamy aroma of a street pretzel

in New York City in the eighties.

It might turn up on a baseball field, echo along

with the crack of a bat, or drift through a Percy

Sledge melody or the largo theme of Dvorak’s

New World Symphony. It might live in photos of people

dressed in summer colors to witness two amores join hands

fifty years ago, or get kicked around

by a little boy’s cleats on a soccer field only to appear,

again, in his grin when he graduates college. It may

hover over a hospital bed, survive the stifling

unhealthy heat there, grasp a hand gnarled by arthritis

and pain and, ephemeral and effervescent as it is, seep out

of a grave and haunt the hearts of those who are left.

- © Charlie Brice 2022

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His fifth full-length poetry collection is The Ventriloquist (WordTech Editions, 2022). His poetry has been nominated twice for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.