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Charlie Smith

Author

Someone Still Capable of Change

Aged mothers gape at television. Father, recently sterilized, putters with his equipment     in the shed. Quietude, an absence of spoken plans, the uselessness of revolt, all these are taught now as electives at the university. Someone shakes wa [...]

Creation Rites

Spring 2003 | Poetry

. . .some average of the holiness in every person you have ever run into, consider this, something almost like a wall covered in green vines, an emblem for the spirit, or if not that, what happens when two lovers stand among bushes in a [...]

Blue Windows

Like an animal at the end of a rope, like a robber making a break for the shelter of rocks wedged into the side of the yellow hill, just so I cast about for an appearance, a settlement, the ghost of a stain on an old shirt I put on, to go downstairs [...]

The Shaved Dog

Unreasonable moments, like the dog's hair, shaved and hand-swept against the steps as my father pauses to look into the springy yard, to stare into his past which has become his future and will provide, so he thinks, the commentators at his death. Sp [...]

The Day Race

The small race quite furious and sustained, as love sometimes is, the dull, half-crumpled cars flinging the metal-shouldered flesh into the far turn. We are high up, regal and furious, delighted, spoiled by dust and division, by the battering tumble [...]

Ceremonies

. . . way to put it, a seasonal change, celebration, duck roasting in wine sauce, the taste of sweet potatoes still in your mouth when you step out, the afternoon drifting off, fog on the pond, a New England day in Georgia, love disputed and cont [...]