DREAM HIGHWAY                                                         

A woman dresses in knives.

Curved blades

designed for disemboweling.

This woman who first planted the dark roots

of her kiss against your lips.

Her roots haunted everything:

second-year Algebra,

fraternities dissolved into pot smoke,

marriages on the rocks.

But these roots

also altered DNA.

They sent satellites

around the earth so many times

that even governments became suspicious.

Eventually, though, these roots

as satellites like annoying alarm clocks, found our homes

and buzzed

our romantic dreams.

Woman in knives,

is she

what you expected

when you first tasted her?

Is she younger,

older

than you expected?

Remember the morning she last entered

your dream

and mingled with strange relatives

packing boxes for a move?

Relatives heading cross-country somewhere

based upon a map

that never existed?

She left

in a separate car.

Miles stretched into years

on your dream highway.

Alan Britt: ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) to broadcast a straight read, plus live stream on their Web site of Alan Britt’s poem, "After Spending All Day at the National Museum of Art," as part of their Poets on Painters series.  ABC to credit New Letters as original publisher…..The Poetry Library (www.poetrymagazines.org.uk) providing a free access digital library of 20^th & 21^st century English poetry magazines with the aim of reaching new audiences and preserving the magazines for the future to include Alan Britt’s work published in Fire in their project. The Poetry Project’s sole patronage by Her Majesty The Queen, Elizabeth II…..PCA/ACA Conference 2007 (Boston) Panel Chair for Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry.