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Below the Surface
(What does the sea want?
Its whips falling and falling.)
~Ye Chun
I’ve got a reed for a brain
slurping algae muscles
below canal water.
But I’ve got a drum
and a vision.
Hear the hammer on nails,
felt hammer
on delirious strings
of a horned owl’s eardrums?
I’ve got a drum
and what’s left of a vision.
So, let’s see if we can,
as Ye says, sit and watch
the sea whips
falling and falling,
instead of giving birth
to snowmen, who bleed
to death on a strange planet
with unfriendly weather?
The Bandoneon
The bandoneon uncinches
her white silk gloves
finger by finger,
then folds them
over my exposed ribs,
unbuttons her blouse,
then wriggles her silver, gabardine trousers
down both sides of her moonlit thighs.
The bandoneon and I are engaged.
I wear our rings of solidarity
like two storm clouds
swirling my viridian irises.
Alan Britt served as judge for the 2013 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. He read poetry and presented the “Modern Trends in U.S. Poetry” at the VII International Writers’ Festival in Val-David, Canada, May 2013. Sponsored by LaRuche Arts Contemporary Consortium (LRACC) he read poetry at the Union City Museum of Art/William V. Musto Cultural Center in Union City, NJ in May, 2014. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/media/avfiles/poet-poem-alan-britt.mp3) aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. His latest books are Parabola Dreams (with Silvia Scheibli): 2013 and Alone with the Terrible Universe: 2011. He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.
Email: Alan Britt
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