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 Chiron Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

The End of Something

Out of office and disgraced, Trump
makes money selling MAGA merchandise
at rallies billed as charity events. Evidently
Trump is the charity. He’s pushing
everything from mugs and t-shirts
to chocolate bars in gaudy golden
aluminum foil.

Fifty-two years ago, four students were
murdered at Kent State, and there we were,
at the University of Wyoming—a few liberals
in a sea of agriculture majors, business
majors, and football stars. We marked
those killings with a protest that wound
through the campus and ended at a flag
pole in front of Old Main. Just fifty
of us sitting on the ground waiting
for the Wyoming National Guard
to march toward us, and march they did,
wearing gas masks and carrying M16s—
locked and loaded. O, how they would
have loved to kill us snot-nosed radicals
with our long hair, sandals and bell-bottom
pants. We left that night, peacefully, no one
hurt. We’d made our point, the guardsmen
got to march around as if they were real
soldiers like the ones dying so far away. We
felt optimistic: the US would withdraw from
Vietnam and we’d enter a world where love
and reason carried the flag.