Rachel Trousdale & Charles W. Brice: Two Elegies for Renée Nicole Good

The End at its Beginning by Charles W. Bryce

On tv a man in South Vietnam,
a man we were fighting for, walked
out of a building with another man,
thin, afraid, and handcuffed. The
South Vietnamese man pulled out
a revolver and shot the handcuffed
man in the head. Blood shot out
of his skull like a grisly geyser.

It’s rare that right and wrong are displayed so
clearly. Fifty-nine years later I sit in front of my tv
and watch an ICE agent shoot a woman in the face
three times while she drives away from him.
Her last words were, “I’m not mad at you.”

I think of long dead Germans caught in the Bardo.
Are they wagging their fingers at us?

Now you know what it felt like, they say,
with mouths long silent from decay.
Now you know helplessness.
Now you know evil.

—

List of Possible Causes of My Death by Rachel Trousdale

Probably cancer. Otherwise—
prematurely—sooner than the cells
themselves would instigate—
let’s hope for death by bird:
craning my neck to catch a glimpse
of an unfamiliar chevroned breast,
maybe I will fall from the back
of a motorcycle-taxi, from the window
of a subalpine chateau. Alternately,
increasingly, could it be a bullet,
three bullets, fired by a man in woodland
camouflage on a suburban street
who correctly sees me as the enemy?
How I object to dying
that way or any way, when the amaryllis
in the kitchen is just opening, when the skates
we bought are still unused; how wasteful
to dispose of a whole mind, any mind,
with its stir of ambivalence, curiosity,
desire; how nonsensical of Rupert Brooke
to celebrate heroic death, then fall
to a mosquito, two weeks too soon
to be machine gunned at Gallipoli.
Byron sweating and freezing
at Missolonghi. They didn’t get
what they signed up for. None of us do.
You can’t choose heroism, you can only not choose
to stay home, to drive past. Profligate world,
tossing aside the meticulous irreplicable
assemblage of experience that makes
a self. How wasteful fear is. What courage
it takes, sometimes, to move, to smile, to say
pleasantly to the mask, I’m not mad at you.

~~~

“The End at its Beginning” copyright 2026 Charles W. Brice.

“List of Possible Causes of My Death” copyright 2026 Rachel Trousdale

Charles W. “Charlie” Brice is a Pittsburgh-based retired psychoanalyst known for his numerous poetry collections (like The Ventriloquist). His most recent is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026). 

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poetry book Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem won the Cardinal Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Her latest scholarly book is Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.