Charlie Brice

Immortality

You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts
every third or fourth morning,
cover those non-nut nuts with
blueberries because they have gobs
of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss
every other night to inhibit heart
infections, use mouthwash several
times-a-day to ward-off armies
of oral bacteria, walk the dog every
night for a mile, eat an orange daily,
take your Lipitor horse pill, your
Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi-
vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut
your Metoprolol in half and take it
for your arrythmias, and you do
all this instead of church, instead
of fingering rosary beads and
telling yourself that somewhere
near our galaxy’s big black hole
Jesus and Mary are floating
around without oxygen masks
or spacesuits, and it’s in this way
that you avoid the anvil of disease,
the miasma of malaise, the numinosity
of pneumonia—in this way you make
sure never to die, you make sure
to live forever and ever. Amen.

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022). 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, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.