PSH: Poets of the Week

Alan Britt
alanbritt@comcast.net

Bio (auto)

Alan Britt’s recent books are Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin: 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. Politically speaking Alan has started the Commonsense Party, which ironically to some sounds radical. He believes the US should stop invading other countries to relieve them of their natural resources including tin, copper, bananas, diamonds and oil. He is quite fond of animals both wild and domestic and supports prosecuting animal abusers. As a member of PETA, he is disgusted by factory farming and decorative fur. 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 formally feral cats.

Visit Alan on the web here: http://spectrumofpoeticfire.com/Reader%20Directory/Alan_Britt.htm

Field Trip

Loitering the tropical garden at the Flagler Museum,
Palm Beach, 1957,
my eyes tasted green and merlot ferns
whose seeds resembled blackberry stains
on the undersides of serrated leaves,
also bruised pink petunias pretending to hide
behind melon-colored hibiscus.

During my transgression
from plaster pedestals
supporting hair-line cracks
in marble noses,
from worn spots
on oil portraits of Flagler’s ancestors,
what had I missed, really,
from the memorized details of our 3rd grade teacher’s kindly lexicon?

Well, I suppose, you could say
it all dissipated into one single moment of beautiful confusion
when our young teacher
let her flowing hair of crows
accidentally brush the yellow hips
of two hungry allamanda flowers.

Matt Lee Sharp
matt.lee.sharp@gmail.com

Bio (auto)

Matt Lee Sharp lives in Montevallo, Alabama. He shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and NBA Legend Bill Russell. His poetry can be found under various permutations of his name in various zines across the web.

i want too many women

when i masturbate,

i think of you:
adriana lima

and you:
limber art major
outside of bloch hall.

and i hear a
late night announcer
bellow

"Matt, the
Two-Dick Wonder."

if god was a man, how'd he birth the universe?

the sun is in my belly,
too big too big
and i droop with the weight of it
on the occasional lonely evening-

burning clay red,
flaying skin from the rutting trees.

all life springs from a man in suffering.

it does; it
must.

i am digesting light,
giving new breath to the slugs within my
bowels.

all in an effort to grow something,
to god life into the morning
and split my body
to the place where
words come from.

oh, to be ripe like that

fruit froths from the orchards like a rabid so-and-so. god reclines against a sapling, all pubescent whiskers with a caricatured wheat stalk to boot. why are you smiling, i ask. the labor's hard. the work's degrading; it requires a little height sickness. i ask him again. why are you smiling, you little shit? he starts to whistle, and the sun, like a clang bird, keeps spinning until it eventually eats itself.