Alan Britt’s poems have appeared in Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Christian Science Monitor, Cottonwood, English Journal, Kansas Quarterly, Midwest Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Osiris, Raw Art Review, Stand (UK), plus countless others. He has been nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. He has published 21 books of poetry and served as Art Agent for Andy Warhol Superstar, the late great Ultra Violet, while often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.
SAPPHIRE
(After Stevie Nicks)
Trombone sapphire.
Emotions like the stream Jesus
dipped his fingers into as a boy
when the holy spirit shot through him.
Trombone sheds celestial scales.
You know what it’s like to be me
as much as I know what it’s like
to be you.
Burning man sapphire.
Upside bats fallen from grace
& all the king’s horses & all the king’s men
scrambling to put us back together
—like so many times before—
like so many times gambling
our present for the future.
Naked souls bathing in the stream
that Jesus dipped his fingers into
as a boy when the holy spirit
shot through him.
SILLY POEM
The remote tumbles to the floor.
Thought of flying monopolizes my mind
this silly moment.
But how does one access silly?
Can we see it as beats fractured
and tossed like hepa-breaths
onto a rickety framework
of adjectives and nouns
wandering at dusk with Platero and Juan Ramon
through our poet’s diminutive village?
The perfect time for Neruda
to enter this poem,
this delusionary excuse
for wiling away my time
awaiting Lorca, Aleixandre, Cernuda,
and Jorge Carrera Andrade
to explode from my holiday bag of fireworks.
I’m telling you, the streets are desperate
these days:
no zebra-striped West Nile mosquitos
wrinkling our white cotton socks,
and no surprises, a la Brando soothing
his toothache with a kerchief loaded
with ice chips scooped from the rustic coffin
of the horse rancher’s decaying ramrod.
I’m telling you,
the end is near,
not only for you but also for me.
The end of silliness as I’ve known it
for millennia,
or fossils left behind at preschool,
and beneath the musty pew
of my first taste of Christian magic.
I was hooked, or so I thought,
if one can be hooked
by a hundred-pound monofilament line
haunting the Intracoastal
between West Palm and Lake Worth.
Lake Worth with its mackerel infested pier
and rum-colored sands gulping infatuation
as quickly as lovers could manufacture it.
Actually, Palm Beach was super silly watching
David Beasley mugging Groucho for hours
inside the Breakers Hotel then circling
with both Tommys the Lake Worth Pier’s
midnight parking lot as our thoughts inhaled
pale blue lamplight before trolling our Friday
night haunt, The Hut, along Flagler Drive.
Ah, most of life’s silliness escapes me now, so far
as I can breathe (which, hopefully, will be later than
expected), but I’ll never forget attempting to convince
Everett, Stuart, and Keith how committed I was to
discovering a way to make backyard dog turds taste
foul to my beloved Bouvier des Flandres,
Chanelle Vida Britt.
I could continue, but this is becoming too damn silly.
