Brit Parks is an American poet, writer, artist, and scholar living in Europe. Parks engages her poetry, theory, and art poetics as a study of language itself whilst discussing abstracts of ephemerality, materialism, and vulnerable myths. GLASS LIMBS, her full-length poetry book, was released in 2021. Her forthcoming book, STONE AMNESIA, will feature a collection of poetry and art poetics. She has published upwards of forty poems in international print publications, including five in the book SMEAR, edited by Greta Bellamacina, three in The London Magazine, and twelve in ALBION AN ISLAND ON THE VERGE OF MADNESS, by New River Press. Among other performances, she read her poetry at Shakespeare and Company Paris in 2019 and at Café Central in Menorca, Spain, in 2023. In 2020, she was commissioned to write a poem for the Monuments Men Foundation to honour the 75th anniversary of WWII. Her art poetics are featured in the Japanese photography book MONO by Hiroko Matsubara and Sofia Fanego as well as in Issue 3 of the London-based DOESN’T EXIST MAGAZINE.
VICENS NIGHTINGALE SYNDROME
we solicit a numeral
fleur and ask it
to be a pet, our pet
to never wilt
the elimination of
melancholy invented
in porcelain fevers
the ballet of your wood
squared eyes is
my new companion
a parapet of
sunken oil bending to
teeth starters
A spill forth of
your strings
the disillusion
of limbs has
us verseing
They built stone
teatros and listened
for hours to the
same woes, to
the same quadrant
of love entoured
We are a remembrance
of her as we
hear her walking
dancing instead
instill
Sullen mouth
of a bother
your chambers
are gas, the
kind that stays
in a hallucination
of aire, the kind
that has fallen
in love with
stealing your breath
they hollowed out
your bones, no
one has a sorry as
you are not her
she is sleeping,
look in the mausoleum
first
I BORROW YOU
in my bed secret i am straight i am my casting, coated in a silence
the slather of my bones is hollow the wood inches of my toes are not my feet
i borrow you
i ask for a mercy i know i am the falling cross of an unborn saint in here we are wooden mysteries of wax melted waiting for a savior
i borrow you
i am now my own collar i am now my own help the swollen mouth of my own making
i borrow you