Charles Grosel

Time

Charles Grosel

Time is not a pencil sharpened to extinction, a ballpoint run out of ink. Time does not count off the mile markers nor is it the oscilloscope’s blip that disappears at the orb’s right hand then returns at the left to start again. Time does not press its truths in layers for later excavation, jealous of its dead. Time is not a formula or equation, not an algorithm, not the theory or the experiment that tests it. It’s more the tinkling of a music box in a movie by Renoir, a pinwheel spinning, everything at once and nothing at all.

Our Lump of Clay

Charles Grosel

What bulwark faith in the face of death? Does it matter when matter flees us? Does it ease pain? Fear? The looming black hole of a life at end, our span but the twitch of a rabbit in the bush, a bird. For all this talk of Spirit, we do so cling to our lump of clay.

An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. After stints on both the West and East Coasts, he now lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter. He studied English literature at Yale University and fiction writing at the University of California at Davis, where he was a Regent’s Fellow. To earn a living, he has been a teacher, editor, trainer, and ghost writer, among other jobs, but through it all he has kept at his true vocation, writing poetry and fiction. He has published stories in journals such as Western Humanities Review, Fiction Southeast, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin, as well as poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, and Harpur Palate. Charles owns the communications firm, Write for Success (write4success.net). The Sound of Rain Without Water, a chapbook of poems, came out in December 2020.