Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome Pennsylvania poet Charlie Brice with “They Were Tiny Once,” a wonder-laced lament exploring the human propensity for exploitation. He presents us with a herd of elephants marching with their calves through dusty terrain for water, their journey nothing short of heroic, yet commonplace for them. After such a feat, you might assume these beasts would be treated with reverence, but this is not the case. “When the little one grows up/ he unknowingly becomes, like/ his elders, a commodity who’s/ worth is measured in dollars, euros,/ rubles—a thing reduced to a tusk,/ to something called ivory.” Charlie’s poetic voice is laden with reverence, a gentle alliterative music that plays on the strings of our hearts while avoiding the maudlin. He does not look away from the harsh reality that threatens an intelligent animal already challenged by its environment. The relentless human drive for profit has an extremely high cost: the belonging and life of our fellow creatures.
Read “They Were Tiny Once” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
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, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.