Winter Walk in Pittsburgh
Blizzard so bright the sky turned dark.
Pleasant-sting of flakes against cold-
flushed cheeks. A parka-bundled neighbor
shovel-scrapes his front walk. We gesture
to the snow, palms up, as if in prayer. I love
it, I yell. Me too, he says. Cold-mist erupts
from our mouths—incense to the gelid gods.
I get worried, I say, when we don’t have winter.
They criticized Freud for proposing a death drive,
but what else can we call pumping thousands
of pounds of pollutants into the atmosphere every
day? What else is drill baby drill but a death
sentence for our planet? Too many thoughts
on this walk down Maple avenue in January.
A block further on, a plump beagle named Clyde
lets me pet him in the storm. I love it, but
it makes me miss Mugsi, gone four months
now. Clyde’s sweet tongue and wiggly body,
oddly unsatisfying, like expecting a recipe
to quell hunger without fixing the dish,
like holding onto a winter storm and pretending
that death doesn’t drive us all.
Daddy's Gardy
He toddler-waddled into my garden,
plopped down, and filled his tiny bucket
with topsoil I’d hauled from the nursery
the day before. His stubby arms worked
his plastic shovel while I dug the rows.
At three years he already had a work ethic—
the will to see the job through. He called it
Daddy’s Gardy. It was an ambivalent garden
as we were unwilling to sacrifice the oak
with its shade-leaves to allow enough sun
for vegetables to grow. All we ever reaped
were tiny carrots, dwarfed lettuce, a few
tomatoes, and the sight of that little boy
in the dirt with his shovel and bucket—
merry moments of earth-bound bliss.
At five he’d help wax the car, polish the chrome,
hose down rubber mats. I had to force him to
quit. And the lawn, he’d get his plastic lawn-
mower, line it up with mine, and off we’d go.
If I did it, he wanted to do it too. Sometimes he
sat so close to me, I thought he’d become my left
arm. Years of soccer, baseball, and ultimate Frisbee
followed, along with carefully crafted ceramic
sculptures, exhibits, and high school art awards.
We rooted; we bought mugs—we loved it all.
When we visited him at college, he took
me to the Art Department—told me to turn
my back to him. His assignment was to paint
a portrait of someone he admired. When I
turned around, I saw his portrait of me.
These days he visits three, maybe four
times a year. He lives two thousand miles
away with a woman who can’t stand us.
She guards the gate of our garden, holds
a flaming sword where our joy used to be.
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His nineth poetry collection is Tragedy in the Arugula Aisle (Arroyo Seco Press, 2025). His poetry has been nominated three times for both the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.
January House Literary Journal 
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