Eszter Takacs
Britney Takes Ambien
for Britney Spears
Britney did you hear me say dollar miracle, say lace, say glitter airborne?
I land on the body like a nascent fly, wrap hips in artifice,
fashion a clit like a subculture,
sculpture of my past lives to unbend in your 2007 arms:
we’re drugged. A friend sends me a Twitter memory of that year:
will always love that crazy bitch Britney.
I charge my buzzer to steady my grip on the glock.
Celebration comes in so many shapes, a hundred shades of starshine,
90s agriculture that funnels the deep south with sedative.
Britney, you’re a low stakes stigma, high stakes Louboutin. I cut paste carry the shape
of song toward a rainbow. I fake a soft seizure, overuse the word fin
as if the stage had ever touched me just right. A poem is Britney;
undressed you walk toward the light, land on the moon.
Someone outside screams into the snow shift:
ambient dream are the rapture. God again but pill-pop
isn’t a genre, just a type of disgrace we wear like a charmeuse prom dress.
Eszter Takacs is working on her PhD dissertation about Britney Spears as hero, myth and hostage of capitalist greed. She has taught writing at the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Arkansas, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and Red Rocks Community College. She is the author of the chapbooks The Spectacular Crash (H_NGM_N Books) and Together We Will Talk Right Down to Earth (The New Megaphone). Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, Yalabousha Review, Soft Blow, Hobart, Apartment Poetry, Alice Blue Review, Nightblock, Inter|rupture and elsewhere.
Return to March 2021 Edition
for Britney Spears
Britney did you hear me say dollar miracle, say lace, say glitter airborne?
I land on the body like a nascent fly, wrap hips in artifice,
fashion a clit like a subculture,
sculpture of my past lives to unbend in your 2007 arms:
we’re drugged. A friend sends me a Twitter memory of that year:
will always love that crazy bitch Britney.
I charge my buzzer to steady my grip on the glock.
Celebration comes in so many shapes, a hundred shades of starshine,
90s agriculture that funnels the deep south with sedative.
Britney, you’re a low stakes stigma, high stakes Louboutin. I cut paste carry the shape
of song toward a rainbow. I fake a soft seizure, overuse the word fin
as if the stage had ever touched me just right. A poem is Britney;
undressed you walk toward the light, land on the moon.
Someone outside screams into the snow shift:
ambient dream are the rapture. God again but pill-pop
isn’t a genre, just a type of disgrace we wear like a charmeuse prom dress.
Eszter Takacs is working on her PhD dissertation about Britney Spears as hero, myth and hostage of capitalist greed. She has taught writing at the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Arkansas, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and Red Rocks Community College. She is the author of the chapbooks The Spectacular Crash (H_NGM_N Books) and Together We Will Talk Right Down to Earth (The New Megaphone). Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, Yalabousha Review, Soft Blow, Hobart, Apartment Poetry, Alice Blue Review, Nightblock, Inter|rupture and elsewhere.
Return to March 2021 Edition