May 26~ CHARLIE BRICE

Thanks for stopping by, poetry lovers! I hope you'll enjoy these two poems by the talented Charlie Brice, who hails from Pittsburgh, PA. His poem, "Silver and Lace with Eggs" is an ekphrastic accompanied by the beautiful artwork of Susan Paterson, posted here with permission of the artist. Thank you, Charlie, and Susan, for sharing your work with SHINE international poetry series!

by Susan Paterson

Silver and Lace with Eggs

One might imagine the doings of the night
before: how cigar smoke cut the air, the amber
swirl of brandy and benedictine in huge snifters,
pretentious proclamations about politics and
fashion, how they wax and wane like the moon.

Someone set this table with care, carried the coffee
carafe, egg cup, silver spoon, and gleaming egg
coddler and gently arranged them on linen that
smelled fresh from the iron. The silver service
honored the hours spent to shine it. And yet, what

we see is disarray—a broken shell, a spoon about
to slide off the table, eggs ready to slip from the
the safety of their silver bowl and splatter across
oak floors or priceless Persian rugs. One might
imagine the next morning, at breakfast, a man

and a woman watch the servants leave. The man
cracks an egg while his wife’s anger rises like
steam in the coffee urn. Why, she demands, was she
excluded from the conversation, exiled to the sewing
room with the other women while the men pondered

the important issues of the day? His smug shrug
provokes her angry yank on the breakfast clothes--
sounds of crashing silver and cracking eggs—her way
of enlivening endless days of boredom and distress,
the nineteenth century plight she was born to.

Or

One can imagine a clandestine couple watching hotel
maids leave after spreading breakfast on the linen
draped table. Even after a night of wicked love, they
cannot subdue their wanton desire—their needs so
urgent that lace, spoon, and egg crash to the floor

with the throb of their writhing bodies. Is this the
conundrum of la condition humaine, the confusion
between violent love and hate? Could it be that
only indifference contains clarity, that little is safe
beyond the sterility of piety?

Or

One might imagine the old man’s last breakfast--
children far away, wife gone, friends lost
behind life’s curtain, draped in illness and death.
Everything in his life shines, but for no one.
There are no reflections. One imagines that

he only ate that one egg before he rose,
clutched his chest, watched his knees buckle.
Still, as his collapse became inevitable, he
grabbed the linen, clung to the lace. One can
imagine that he held on.

Dust

When I saw dust in the corner
of the coffee table in my mother’s
living room I thought, She’s old now.
Her home was usually immaculate.

Thirty years later, our small plates,
the ones my wife and I eat lunch on,
are chipped. Who cares? There’s just
the two of us, no one else sits with us
to watch seething shards of fascism
creep along the streets of our country.

The cups I use to serve my wife iced tea--
her gnarled arthritic hands can’t hold
the tall kitchen glasses I bought several
Christmases ago are also chipped.

I look at those plates and cups and think, We’re old.

Once we hosted parties where crystal
glasses held cocktails and porcelain
gleamed under tiny meatballs, cheese
and crackers, served to friends.

Those were days of hope, of kinder,
of gentler. Now our country is torn,
worn—democracy chipped away bit
by bit, cracked to silence. How did we
get here, dust in every crevice
of our country?

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.

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