Alan Britt

Sundown

Do you crave a coquina
ebbed waist-deep
in the Gulf’s glistening
black sand?

The coquina’s pulse
is weak.

Or would you prefer
to lie
suspended in a hammock,
a cocoon of sorts,
both ends notched
to the infinite?

A puzzle that requires no resolution?

Wait! I’ve got it!
I’ll bet what you really crave are exhausted
salmon muscles just beginning
to sag from the old arm bones
of the dusky sky.

Or are you simply,
hopelessly predisposed,
indefatigably infatuated
with a simple
dark-waisted coquina
half-sunk
in the glistening Gulf?

Alan Britt’s recent books are Greatest Hits (2009), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). The Poetry Library (www.poetrymagazines.org.uk) providing a free access digital library of 20th & 21st century English poetry magazines with the aim of preserving them for the future has included Britt’s work published in Fire (UK) in their project. Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008. Britt recently served as Panel Chair for Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry for the PCA/ACA Conference 2007 in Boston and read poetry at Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ (2009) and the WPA Gallery/Ward-Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY (2008). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2008. Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formerly feral cats.