Those dangerous, leather-creaking brutes—
Cheyenne cops—growled, grinded down
16th Street, led the motorcade past my parents’
restaurant supply store where I watched
the tarp-covered ICBMs, half a block long,
hauled on flatbeds toward the silos of extinction
that circled Cheyenne. I was ten, three years past
the night cousin Terry’s car summersaulted along
a ditch outside of Torrington, his chest crushed—
his drunken addendum to the Korean War finally
ended. I felt then what I later learned: there might
be rhyme, but never reason, to this thing called life
which caused me, much later, to gravitate towards
Sartre’s claim that it makes no difference whether
you lead nations or get drunk alone, and to find
respite, even relief, in Camus’s embrace of Sisyphus,
his idea that laughter propelled the doomed
death-cheater to push his boulder up that hill.
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His tenth poetry collection is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026).
