I wish everything in my life
could be as simple
as the orange leaves
on our service berry bush
*
or the purple plumes
of our monkshood plants.
But we can’t get in touch
with our friend, Lily.
*
She lives in two rooms
with her husband and three
children. They went through
everything awful to get
*
to our country where they started
their new lives in the land
of freedom. The lawyer told
them their papers would
*
be ready last month. They don’t
know what the hold-up is.
Today men in masks put
them in a truck
*
with no license plates. We can’t find
them. We don’t know where
they are. For them our country
has become like our
*monkshood—every part
of that plant is deadly,
poisonous, but
beautiful to look at.
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.
