Dodgeball

By Charlie Brice

We’d line up against the wall like the condemned
awaiting mass execution. Vince and Victor,

the two best athletes in the fourth grade, their
hair slicked with Brylcreem, combs in their back

pockets, skinny svelte bodies snug within their
corduroys and penny loafers, stood before us

like the Crusaders we read so much about, guys 
like Charlemagne who loved his daughters so 

much he wouldn’t allow them to marry, who 
was so beastly and bombastic that he inspired both 

Napoleon and Hitler, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 
Against the wall the condemned of St. Mary’s would beg, 

“Pick me, Vince.” “Pick me, Victor.” But not me. I was 
a rotund eight-year-old whose only skill was prayer 

and that didn’t take off the pounds, provide me with friends, 
or improve my athletic abilities. I loved that I was always 

picked last. I’d make sure to get ball-slammed immediately 
so I could hide in a corner of the playground and dream about 

the lovely winter storm that would be coming. Cheyenne got 
them as early as September. I’d watch those huge snowflakes 

land like feathers and transform the world into a crystalline
purity beyond dodge or ridicule.  No two flakes were alike.

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 Pinnacles of Hope is just published by Impspired Books. 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.