if this is an emergency - charlie brice

Hang up and dial 000 for God. Ask Him why, after millennia,

after infinity, after eternity, this was the plan he divined:

War after war where old men, gluttons for power, send young 

men and women off to deserts, rice patties, muddy trenches, 

and angry oceans to die.

Ask him what purpose He had in mind when He created a Down 

syndrome baby, with the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen, who

came into this world with acute myelogenous leukemia—the little

girl who appears in the advertisement for St. Jude’s Hospital.

Why did He give us the Beatles, Rachmaninoff, Turner’s light, 

Caravaggio’s marble that could get up and walk, sunbeams 

braiding through fir trees after a rain, orioles, cardinals, song 

sparrows, and that special person you spent your life looking 

for? Why all of that only to take it away?

How does it work into His plan to spend our last years wondering 

which joint will hurt the most, which muscle will give out, 

which breath will be the last?

Why is He a he? Does God have a sexual preference, or is God

the original They?

Is there an emergency room for the bewildered, a triage unit that 

sorts out the absurd from the ridiculous? 

Whatever happened to Dial-A-Joke?

Whither all those friends, lovers, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers

with their expiration dates? And we who are left, flummoxed 

before that last joke, astonished by nothingness, to whom do we pray?

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 Miracles That Keep Me Going (WordTech Editions, 2023). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.