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 for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Sunlight Press, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.

A Whole New Ballgame

Go to the edge, for God’s sake. Take a little risk.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

During a lull in my writing program

my wife, also a writer, decided to lull me

into attending a poetry workshop with her.



I was a fictioneer, hadn’t written a poem 

for twenty years. Poetry was her domain.

Come on, she said, and flashed her doe-

eyes at me. I couldn’t resist. 



Maria Mazziotti Gillan, the workshop

leader. Never heard of her. Never read

her work. I just knew that she knew

more about poetry than I’d ever know.



Maria read her poems and, as she did, 

stirred my soul as well as her tea. Write 

a poem that includes a popular song, 

she urged us. Everyone relates to music. 



Write a poem? She can’t be serious! 

Hey, I’m just an observer, just sittin’ 

next to my wife like a good boy. 

Maria looked at me, her kind face



resolute. Write a poem, she said.

My brain became a wind-wrecked 

cerebral dustbowl. Every idea I’d ever 

had blew away like ruined topsoil. 



My wife and the other poets scribbled 

away while I, frozen to my seat, sat bolt 

upright and waited for rigor mortis to set in. 



And then the muse I didn’t know I possessed 

appeared—pitched to me a poem and a baseball 

at the same time! My mind swerved back a week 

to PGE Park where our son, Ariel, and I watched 



the Portland Beavers play the Seattle Rainiers 

in a triple A baseball game. It was haircut night! 

Barbers set up under the stands to trim and shave 

fans during the game. My pen couldn’t move fast 

enough—the manually operated scoreboard, 



the announcer doing a Harry Karry imitation 

while, arms around each other, Ari and I sang 

Take Me Out to the Ballgame. That was the song 

I used for my poem—Take Me Out to the Ballgame.



Maria goaded me into reading my piece.

I thought it was horrible. My voice trembled.

My hands shook. She loved my poem, so did

the other poets, the real ones, in the workshop.



Three weeks later I sent the poem to the 

Barbaric Yawp. They accepted “The Game”

immediately. Holy shit, I thought, maybe 

I ought to write a few more of these.

Father

Her father screamed at her,	

Why did you bring this Jewish scum

	into our family?



This, is front of the kids 

	and her Jewish husband.



Her father had been a cop—

	used to brandish his gun 

	when she was little. Waved

	it around to make his point.



She gathered the kids and left. After that, 

silence severed their relations.



Twenty years later a cousin called.

	Your father’s dying, she said,

	He wants to see you.



Guilt washed over her 

	like septic spume. She stood

	in a spinny of shame,

	indecision,

	hatred.



Her eyes scrims of plangent dew, she

	asked for my opinion. Should

	she return, the prodigal daughter?



A father, I said, is more than a sperm donor.

	He’s the hand that opens a world,

	not a cumbrance and critic,



but the one who furnishes the future,

	provides the vernacular of hope;

the one who says, 



You can do it, dear.

Elegy for the Invisible Man

We begged him to visit, 

but he rarely did—missed

our son’s graduations

and art exhibitions, never 

commented on our poetry, 

never attended even one 

of our readings. He resented 

my wife, his sister, because, 

as he insisted, she teased him 

when he was four 

and she was eight.



He died like he lived—angry 

and arrogant, blaming everyone

in his life for his failures. 

On his deathbed he “absolved”

my wife for the guilt he was sure

she felt for all the wrongs 

he imagined she’d done him.



The tears I never shed for him 

were like those in Hiroshima, 

stopped before they could form

and instantly evaporated.