Alec Solomita’s fiction has appeared in Peacock Journal, the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, and The Drum (audio), among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The New Criterion, The Galway Review, Bold + Italic, Litbreak, The Blue Nib, Red Dirt Forum, and elsewhere.  His chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017 and is still available at Finishing Line Press. His first full-length book of poetry, “Hard To Be a Hero,” was published by Kelsay Press in 2021. Both can be found on Amazon. He’s just finished another, “Glass Flowers.” He lives in Massachusetts.

Like Dylan

In the empty carriage house of our alternative
school, James and I sat together in a corner
hunched over my tiny record player thrilling
to Dylan Thomas’s tumbling, slightly drunken,
“A Few Words of a Kind.”

The blustery Welsh boy-man sang in his resonant baritone
about his youth and how poetry hit him like a brick.
And how, in those early “hurly burly” days, he fell in love,
as well, with the green sea that wreathed
the eccentric town in which he “simmered up.”

At eighteen, we were perhaps
the ideal age to fall in love with his humor
as much as he seemed to love his own voice.
We were just sophisticated enough to appreciate
his well-aimed arrows, “I always carry
Kierkegaard in my pocket. What do you carry?”

Naturally, we wanted to be like him:
brilliant, funny, deep, and drunk.
Turned out the last was easiest,
So in our tweed jackets, we bought
pints of bourbon from the slanted
package store nearby.

James was an almost-handsome,
thick-faced boy with auburn curls,
not as long as my blonde ones
but pretty enough to start rumors
in the school about boy-love,
none of which I credited

until I dozed off one late afternoon
by the record machine, full of Jim Beam,
and woke suddenly, finding myself
in James’s lap, he stroking my hair, saying,
“My golden boy, my golden boy.”

I chanted softly so as not to offend,
“Hey, James, get the fuck away from me.”
He released me so quickly
that my head hit the vinyl floor.

“Dylan was a lot of things,”
I said, “But not a homo.”
James said, “I’m not. I’m not.
I’m just fond, is all.”
I lifted my head, kissed his cheek,
and placed another Thomas
recording on the turntable.