Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/KJGBY76mmS4) 22.12.2021.
Hope
Sometimes you want to scream into a hole.
Down there you find a worm or two and think,
poor creatures, blind, deaf, and squirmy. Do they
sense anguish through the vibrations of my raucous voice?
You pick your head up out of the hole and spy a pink rose,
its web of bloom brandished from a nearby bush and think:
some form of shit helped birth this flower, perhaps
a milky maggot-filled human composting patch.
Forget the carbon chunder of cremation, or the fermenting fervor
of formaldehyde, now there’s a clean way to become dirt:
Human Composting is all the rage, legal in Washington, Oregon,
and Colorado—something to look forward to. Then there’s your
realization that years of pain have turned the one you loved into a
writhing silhouette of someone you don’t know but want to escape.
Oh, dear reader, you wanted a happy ending,
but you got this instead.
Today on Facebook an old friend from childhood asks,
Where do you find hope these days?
How awful he must feel to ask this question in such a public forum.
Then you remember that he’s a minister, a man of the cloth.
You think, Holy crap, we’re really in trouble now!
Holy crap!
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 chapbook, All the Songs Sung (Angel Flight Press), and his fourth poetry collection, The Broad Grin of Eternity (WordTech Editions) arrived in 2021. His poetry has been nominated twice for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.
