The Last Time
New and Selected Poems

Charles Ries' fifth book of poetry explores the perplexities of modern love. Join the confused expert as he studies the wonders and perils of romance.

I'd Rather Be Mexican

A white guy from Milwaukee reflects on the wonders of being Mexican. Join Carlos, pale face, ghost boy in this existential meditation on life in the salsa sea.

The Fathers We Find
The making of a pleasant,
humble boy
(Unpublished; seeking representation)

A Novel Based on Memory
by
Charles P. Ries

SYNOPSIS

Set amidst the farm fields and rolling hills of Southeastern Wisconsin, THE FATHERS WE FIND is a coming-of-age story that takes place between 1950 and 1971. This novel based on memory closely parallels the experiences of its author who grew up on a mink farm just outside of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Drowning in a sea of nuns, priests, and hard-working church-goers, “Chuck,” our narrator, stumbles his way to enlightenment with help from a series of delightful men in a journey that is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and nostalgic.

Following his father’s funeral, we find Chuck, a middle-aged man, sitting on the back porch of his parents’ farm home trying to remember, “how he got here, to this place.” His reflections take him back to his earliest memory, and his first job, at four years of age and the reward he would receive for becoming a little man. From there we find Chuck’s mother praying that God make her first-born child a soldier in His army. Which He does. God follows that up by making five more of Helen and Carl’s children recruits in His holy arsenal, causing parishioners to wonder if Helen and Carl might carry some sort of vocational virus. For some, this virus is a reason to draw near in hope of infection, and for others—well, it prompts them to run.

While prayerfully asking that he follow in his elder siblings footsteps, Chuck begins to see his shot at the priesthood slip through his hands when he realizes, in many veiled and not so veiled ways, that he may not be normal. Chuck resigns himself to life on the dust hip of his sacred family.

After taking a dare from his cousin to speed down a local park hill on his bike, he slides face first onto a pitch and gravel running track. On Sunday, his gray, red, iodine-orange face peers up at the outstretched hand of the priest administering communion, prompting him to say, “Body of Christ Almighty….what happened to your face?!” Additional large and small disasters further conspire to convince Chuck that he will never be a priest, and, worse still, he will never be normal. Yet, he is an earnest boy with an over-active mind and a desire to please God. He is relentless in his effort to do the right thing.

On the mink farm, Chuck is schooled in the joys of work, sex, and drinking by the Errol Flynn of Mink Farmers: Marvin Rammer. When off the farm, Chuck is taken to the School Of Joyful Thriftiness with his Uncle Peter and learns how to do the Fisherman’s Cheer by Leon Heinmeister, the bull-shitting dockworker. Set within a family who believes that praying together and staying together are somehow linked, Chuck is set free from his overdeveloped scruples by the most unlikely of allies, Father Robert Weller, the Pastor of St. Peter Claver Church. In confessing a small litany of fleshful sins, Chuck realizes that Weller wants all the copy that’s not fit to print and blurts out a home run confession. He lets Weller revel in his newly discovered marvel—SEX. The result of which only gets Chuck a couple of Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s along with Weller’s caution, “to slow it down there, little fellow, or you’ll rub it off.”

After a stop at Hertzel’s Day Old Delights Bakery and sneaking onto the Nut Hill Ski mound with his Uncle Peter, they stop at the VFW for a Fish Fry. There Chuck witnesses an exchange between Lilac Rummelfinger, an uptight parishioner, and dockworker Leon Heinmeister that makes him see what a thin barrier stands between people’s differences. As he watches two of the most opposite people dance the Polka and find attraction, Chuck realizes that not everything is as it seems.

Exposed to the arts, mysticism, and social justice by his brother Bob, Chuck discovers a world that doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about as he brings a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti to his Freshman English class or uses the cultural icon of Che Guevara to advance the political aspirations of his classmate, the Birdman, Andy Wertzelski. Chuck is a messenger before a sea of faces that wonder why he doesn’t just shut up, get laid, and drink beer. With the tragic death of Marvin, a failed romance with his honors social studies teacher, and a painful fight with his father over the Viet Nam War, the inconsistencies of life send him into an existential adolescent spiral.
As a farewell to high school and to blunt his growing feelings of bewilderment, Chuck hosts a party for a few close friends while his parents are on a road trip in Father Weller’s new Oldsmobile. The festivities get out of hand when hundreds of additional friends and friends of friends arrive. At the party’s frenzied height, Uncle Peter makes an unscheduled stop to grub under the mink pens, which are a virtual fertility clinic for fishing worms. The revelers are quickly dispatched and Chuck again finds himself on the back porch with his uncle in a poignant moment of insight and acceptance. This brings our narrator full circle and returns him to his father’s funeral, when a final memory and concluding insight come to him and weaves his life and its meaning together.

Albino Prunes
(A Short Story, 2004)

ESC! Magazine recently published Charles P. Ries’s humorous short story, Albino Prunes in Volume 8, Issue 2. Read it here.

Odd
(Four-sep Publications, 2005)

Join the intrepid traveler as he explores the inner universe of humanity and finds that we are, perhaps the only organism capable of being conscious of how odd life is.

Monje Malo Speaks English
(Fourstep Publications, 2003)

Charles Ries second book of poetry and a refined evaluation of life as seen by a mystic and citizen philosopher.
 

Bad Monk: Neither Here Nor There
(Fourstep Publications, 2002)

Charles Ries first book of poetry and his early reflections on God, sex, women and all those things that make life go round.