Charlie Brice writes

What I Learned from My Mother 
                                    After Julia Kasdorf

To thy own self be true.
Hard work pays off.
Do your best always.
If you make a promise, keep it.
Don’t give up.
Don’t let others get in your way.

Don’t be smart.
Don’t learn too much
or stop being the class clown,
that could get intimidating,
that could make it necessary
to miss the parent/teacher conferences.

You can stay in a relationship
for twenty-eight years
with a drunken sop
mostly because, up against him,
you look strong and competent.

When your drunken husband dies
you take over the restaurant supply business.
You borrow lots of money
because your suppliers ship everything
COD since a woman, in 1964,
shouldn’t be running a business.

You put up with your customers’ crazy demands.
You repair their broken ranges
and refrigeration units on Sunday.
The customer is always right.
You make your business
a tremendous success
and sell it to your main competitor
in Denver. You date him,
but drop him when he suggests
a romantic week in Sicily.
You never leave the Catholic Church
even though it totally abandoned you.

You can ride an emotional roller coaster
all your life, you can be tremendously generous,
and fly into uncontrollable rages
in unpredictable seconds.
You can call your son a shit-ass,
a son-of-a-bitch, then you can
tell him you love him.

 Gaea and Erichthonius-- Manner of Kadmos Painter

Charlie Brice writes

Buffalo

On Sundays my mother took me to Frontier Park

where there were three old, worn out, scruffy

and dusty buffalo. I can’t remember

my father ever being there.

Those were calm Sundays.

My father was probably sleeping it off.

Maybe mother hadn’t drunk the night before.

I don’t know.

We’d take a loaf of whole wheat bread.

She’d hold me up to the fence and

I’d feed one of the buffalo a slice.

His old sandpaper tongue

would glide out of his mouth.

He never took his side-eye off me—

even as I fed him. He’d learned

never to trust a white person.

Giants in the Mist -- James Corwin