Alan Britt (4 poems)
PLATO’S TRACTOR
At 1:33 roses melting gasoline tank beside a cane rocker
frosted with thunder clouds & hydrogen beyond recognition→
“Although,” she mused, “what spewed from incinerator stacks
resembled congressmen & was nothing like purported, even
though,” she, lamented “their eyelids were wooden shutters caved
completely in. ”→ → Typical diatribe, I thought, but worth the
wait → → → Below her withers lurked an angel made of conch
shells’ swirling faith that everything’s on fire with voices consisting
of tarpaper & mud nestled into coral kitchens chirping for bamboo
to snap like cobras leaping from stainless steel faucets that arc like
razor - blue Atlantic flying fish with switchblade fins→ → → → like
ambulance screams, like icicle eyelashes, like bolts of lightning with
tarpon scales the size of lazy thoughts steaming, billowing,
flickering from a brahma skull leaning against a barn set ablaze by
a metabolic moon & doused by roses leaking from the empty tank
on a red tractor or the shadow of a red
tractor→→→→→whichever comes first.
BLUE JAYS
I’ve been thinking about blue jays
as almost every morning they’re at it
berating each other across the faded
boards of our backyard split-rail fence.
I listen intently to their bickering which
resembles a rusty spring grinding the hinge
on a whitewashed wooden gate.
They abandon one tree suddenly
only to scold from another.
They are industrious souls.
It’s obvious they have priorities:
in early morning hours: things must
get done, so arrangements are made.
For them every wasted minute represents
a black-striped gesso-white & blue
feather falling from their lives.
Right now, the naked afternoon, fresh
from a shower, saunters around the corner
of our dirty asbestos shingled house
only to dissolve beneath the dripping
darkness of a weeping cherry tree.
One jay barely ten feet away feeds
at the roots of a nearby silver maple.
Suddenly, this jay, with typical no-nonsense
bravado, rises & flutters inside the wet
branches of the weeping cherry tree
for all of three seconds before exploding
across the backyard announcing a new
priority all the way!
GLOBAL WARMING
From a musical note coated all winter
with nickel to a leopard in designer
shades ascending a thorny acacia,
or water buffalo imposing its will
on imperative reality—so grab the
note coated in nickel & pretend
that the zeitgeist, eyebrows blistered
by CO2s, but otherwise observing
the Kiddie Show of animated
Might Makes Right & thinking,
hell, I’ve got an arsenal fit for
a family of four
plus a minivan
with a limited warranty,
so I could give two
shits about the ozone.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
(TV with sound off, listening to Lila
Downs singing “Black Magic Woman”)
Shag mop teases us to commercial.
Billboard’s stained-glass wings.
Black magic.
Stop messing around
with your idiotic tricks.
Mariposa blanca pierces
tu corazón de azul.
The night grows a
beak like one of those
banana-billed toucans
from the Amazon.
Cicadas clatter ceramic
castanets. Stop messing
around with your idiotic
tricks. Stop messing round.
Stop.
In August 2015 Alan Britt was invited by the Ecuadorian House of Culture Benjamín Carrión in Quito, Ecuador as part of the first cultural exchange of poets between Ecuador and the United States. In 2018 he served as judge for the The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. His poetry has appeared in Agni, Alien Buddha, Backbone Mountain Review, Bitter Oleander, Bloomsbury Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Confrontation, English Journal, Epoch, Flint Hills Review, GloMag (India), International Gallerie (India), Into the Void, Irodalmi Jelen (Hungary), January Review, Kansas Quarterly, Letras (Chile), Levure Littéraire (France-USA-Germany), Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Northwest Review, Osiris, Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador), Poet’s Market, Stand Magazine (UK), Sunstone, and Tulane Review. His poetry has also appeared in Verse Daily. He has published 17 books of poetry, his latest being Ode to Nothing and Violin Smoke (both translated into Hungarian by Paul Sohar and published in Hungary: 2018 and 2015), plus Crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge (Translated into Romanian by Flavia Cosma and published in Romania: 2017). A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars he now teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.