SATURDAY NIGHT
 
The fog’s shoulders bulge
with creeper frogs.
 
A dog's barks
are wooden,
muffled.
 
Behind a gauze curtain
the sulfur moon
pats her ribs
with a coral-colored bath towel.
 
 

FAIRY TALE
 
A shapely redhead
in black and dolphin green
nylon jumpsuit ambles
past our wild hedges
along the boulevard.
 
An ancient wolf lives
inside the exotic eyelashes
of these neighborhood maples.
 
While the invisible wind,
with mascara eyes
forms a cobra’s hood
and crouches behind everything.
 
 

SHARING WINE WITH CLOSE FRIENDS
 
At night slugs emerge
looking for chardonnay or a dense merlot
with a streetlight’s discarded blouse
rippling its surface.
 
The slugs inch their leopard backs,
glistening silver trails over moonlit dirt
in patterns alien to western economics.
 
Drawn through darkness by the beautiful glass foot
of wine
standing naked,
up her smooth leg, her rounded waist,
until they drape thirsty
muscular tongues
over the lip
of my trembling glass.
 
When I find them
sharing my wine,
I’m forced to give pause,
and for a moment I become inert
as a cicada husk
blown upside down
by a silk breeze.
 
 

LAST DAY OF SUMMER
 
Two grasshoppers copulate
on a rusted green metal garden stake
waist deep in a flood
of weeds.
 
Smaller green legs
embrace flat brown thighs
from behind.
 
Cicadas arrive
as aperitif.
 
Behind mustard wild flowers,
below a white shed,
our Bouvier resembles a Greek statue
perched at the mouth
of a groundhog’s den.
 
 

SEPTEMBER DUSK
 
A hawk’s cinnamon wings slice the air
just above a muscular waist of oak leaves.
 
Cuts a clean, fresh swath.
 
The scar, oblong, half-circled,
and stitched by white ashes,
falls from a jade silence.



Bio: Alan Britt teaches English at Towson University. His recent books are Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Essays recently in Clay Palm Review and Arson. Interviews and poetry recently featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review and Poet’s Market 2000. Other poems in The Bitter Oleander, Christian Science Monitor, Confrontation, English Journal, Epoch, Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Puerto del Sol, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Sou’wester, Square Lake, plus the anthologies, For Neruda, For Chile (Beacon Press), Fathers: Poems About Fathers (St. Martin’s Press) and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy (Ediciones El Santo Oficio, Peru).

Alan occasionally publishes the international literary journal, Black Moon, from Reisterstown, Maryland, where he lives with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Friese and two formerly feral cats.