Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Charlie Brice of Pennsylvania, who debuted with us in our “Belonging” issue. “Point Breeze” is a meditation on mortality and the slowing dance of aging bodies. Charlie and his wife are taking a drive through the Point Breeze neighborhood, admiring the stately homes and enjoying a brief respite from the challenges of mobility and aging. He reflects on how they arrived at this stage of life.
“When did the reductio ad absurdum / begin, the narrowing that leads to the end / that is sleep, not even sleep, darkness that’s / not darkness, a nothingness that can’t be named?”
Life seems to accelerate as we age, and there are far more things to see, learn, and experience than anyone can ever take in. It can feel cruel that curiosity endures even as the body fails. Yet moments of beauty and joy still shine through, as they do during this simple drive through Point Breeze. Using the metaphor of the neighborhood, Charlie invites us to look beyond ruin and decay and attend to the beauty of the present moment. His tenderness and devotion are evident throughout the poem, as is his resistance to accepting mortality’s inevitable approach; his words fall in an alliterative cadence, a drumbeat we cannot evade. This is a memento mori for all of us, a reminder of both life’s fragility and its enduring grace, and of the dignity that remains even as the body ages and becomes vulnerable.
Read “Point Breeze” in Synkroniciti’s Dignity, Vol. 8, No. 3, available 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 tenth poetry collection is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.