……………………………………………………………Inspired by, “What’s Broken,”
………………………………………………………………………………….Dorianne Laux

The little boy who only wanted
to be rocked on his mother’s lap
grows to desire nothing more
than to hop in his baby blue
Mercury Comet and drive
far away from her.

The lovers who spent hours in embrace
but grew to despise the thought of each other.
The scale learned to precision eventually
abandoned to atonal schemes and dissonance.

The cranky white-haired genius who wrote
that only two roads diverged in the wood
when there were hundreds of roads, some
with potholes, some never completed, some
washed away by floods, by tears, by years
of overuse and faulty repair.

Still, my dear, there’s the simple act
of stroking your head, my light touch
upon your hair, the palpable sense
that we two broken ones are still here.

Charles Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His fifth full-length poetry collection is The Ventriloquist (WordTech Editions, 2022). His poetry has been nominated twice for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.