GAS Featured Poet: Alan Britt

 

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.