Let’s agree some months
seem endless, like winter
was a word we used
for a drill taken straight
to the skull. There’s times
our lives are houses
whose pipes have frozen
over the floors all warped
and feeding a rank and moldy
thaw. But we’re men in love
with language. So I thought
that you should know:
if you crawl from your cold
in the north, to my house,
on the lip of the south,
there’s a patch of yellow
daffodils, all butter-mouthed
and wild. There’s an oak
whose ice-broken limbs
have buds like small
hard fists. We could make
a sweet syrup from basil
to mix with a poor man’s
bourbon and a dash or two
of juice we squeezed by hand
from an orange. Come, sit
on the porch with me. Just say
the word azalea. Its blooms
like hearts splayed wide
for anyone passing to see.
Britton’s poetry has recently appeared in such journals as Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Southern Indiana Review, and The Massachusetts Review. He was the recipient of Emerging Artist Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council in 2011 and 2017 and is an Associate Professor of English at West Kentucky Community & Technical College where he edits the journal Exit 7.