IRON OVERLOAD

(For my mother, Roberta Crawford)

Most people dying from iron overload
never hear the tick of the clock,

or tiny church bells
rattling the rafters of the brain.

As iron settles into the heart, pancreas and liver,
carefully unfolding death’s warm quilt, needlessly,

hardly anyone dying from iron overload
hears each tick of the clock

or tiny church bells
rattling the dusty rafters of the brain.

As killer iron, like Genghis Khan, ravages the body,
rusting livers, brains and hearts,

an icy chill eases beneath death’s warm quilt,
needlessly, needlessly, needlessly.

by Alan Britt

EXPECTATIONS

by Alan Britt

The woman with ebony eyelashes
presses the elevator
button
as my waist
flows
past her perimeter.

The door closes.

Intimate thoughts
are vaporized
by green numbers
illuminating each floor.

A breath of cloves,
or gingivitis?

But I imagine a leisurely stroll
through moonlit surf
if only
to taste the purple coquinas.

Her toe pounds twice,
calf stiffens
as the elevator oozes to a stop
1,000 stories
above my wildest expectations.

No one enters.

No one departs.

We descend
at a rate faster
than you can imagine,
falling about 10,000 years per second.

At around the third floor
we begin the false stop
so often experienced
on public elevators.

Then the door opens;
we exit like two swans.

*

Too much attention is paid
to sanctioned marriages.

Not enough
to impulse.

WAKING UP

by Alan Britt

If I woke up
in a house, post WW II,
Tampa, 1956,
walls half-painted,
plastered, of course,
by wisdom enthusiastically delivered
via radio,
do you think I'd still
embrace
a suffering cello,
or do you imagine
that our new mushroom horizon
should include every poet
living on this planet
to be the freest
of citizens
howling in protest
before a stainless-steel General Electric toaster
reflecting our country's innocence
like a sentimental mirror
held up
before the wicked Queen
in a Brother's Grimm fairy tale?

OCTOBER DREAM

by Alan Britt

A tiny grey bird,
like an afterthought
or an ash,
abandons the menorah
of a blue spruce.

Keith Richards
drags his guitar case
through the Tampa airport,
settles in
at a motor lodge
once sleepwalked
by Nico Suárez
as a starving poet.

Due to the juxtaposition
of planets,
they never meet.

On vacation in Bolivia, tonight,
Nico & Kristine watch
as blue neon flames of a cantina
below flicker on & off.

Drunken bullets
leave teeth marks
in their alabaster ceiling
& walls.

Twenty years later
at Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia,
some of this hot lead
lands on the reptile strings
of Keith’s guitar.


*Alan Britt teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University in Maryland.