Truck's new driver for July

Many thanks go to Lars Palm for wheeling us through June. 


Big greetings to Elizabeth Switaj, who'll be at the wheel for July.

lars palm signing out

i have now completed my month behind the wheel. it's been great fun & i'm curious to see who will drive in july. thank you Halvard for this opportunity

Susana Gardner

FROM SONS AND LOVERS

That’s not the same as marrying her      Very

                                                           Well

                                                                 Very

                                                           Well

            And awfully nice

There was silence

HIS &

HER      affair was—

Like a fire fed on books

If there was no more volumes it would die out—

She could read him like a book

Could place her finger on the chapter and the line.

Very well

                       Well ,well

Very.

Very well then. Well well very. Very very well. Well
Well very. Well very well, indeed. Well well very well. Well very well very well very well very well well well Very very well very not the same not the same as marrying Her. No, not the same as marrying her awfully nice—SILENCE SIGH well well very very well AFFAIR indeed well well very CHANCE, very very well a fair indeed. INDEED HIS &HER like a fire fed on books, every line precise— a fired book on HIM. She placed her finger on—laced her finger on chapter and the line of him. The line. Very well then. The line: Well well very. Very very well well well well well well well well well well well well well very.

from Sons and Lovers

                  after Holly Pester

HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy washing up.

While HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy washing
up. Gradually, He was making it possible to earn a livelihood by art, while SHE was busy washing
up. While HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy
washing up. Busy, SHE, washing up… He, gradually, was making it possible to earn a livelihood
by his art. SHE was busy washing up and HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood
by his art. Making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art, SHE was busy washing up, While

HE was gradually…By his art… making it possible to earn a livelihood as SHE was busy washing
up While HE was Possibly gradually making it… earning a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy

washing up While HE was SHE was HE was SHE was SHE was HE was SHE was SHE was HE

was SHE was SHE was HE was SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE

was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art While

SHE was busy, While HE was gradually making it possible washing up to earn a livelihood by

His art. SHE was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood

by his art, while SHE was busy washing up. While HE was gradually art and making it possible

to earn a livelihood by his … SHE Gradually, He, possibly, making it to earn a livelihood by...

SHE… SHE was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by

SHE was busy washing up his art. Busy washing up washing up washing up his art was SHE.

HE gradual, making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art, While SHE was busy washing up…

SHE was busy washing up. SHE was washing SHE was busy washing SHE was busy washing up.

Chris Pusateri

Poem Four (Musée Picasso)

I remember crying

            in the reflection of

the mirror

           I remember

I despise hats. There were many hatted women

in paintings I liked, (I remember)

three women

           at their toilet, an interesting choice of words.

(I would, I remember, have translated it differently).

I remember a black boot, very clearly,

          then a reflection of memorable blue.

A vase of flowers, universally designed.

The clay wore pajamas fashioned from maps, its language UnEnglished,

           its continents blurry. It’s not, but my memory is,

blurry – disfocused. Small Asian child doing poses, that to her

are not poses, are not even

the memories of yoga, I suppose.

I remember the light

and how much less yellow

it was when I left the room.

Because of the blue, because of the difference in translation, I remember.

Different, yet again, because

of the distance.

My memory takes notes

as if this were a test, I ember

in memory a remembrance,

a glow

I wish had been only Picasso,

but was instead

Rosenberg, Apollinaire,

woman as cello,

           mute, Google-proof.

Three from When Jazz Was The Capital of Alaska

The device would like you to wait.

The device would like you to continue waiting.

The device now has information for you.

Sometimes you wish

for something lighter

than sad maroon

or the subatomic black

of matte glint finish,

the suicide,

the infanticide,

the affliction

This is where objects sit

and await their destinies;

they are calm, almost stately,

with a feeling of quiet insanity permeating them,

unable to perish without nature’s permission

The edges fray first

Like there’s any connection

between good posture and moral rectitude.

A certain fractal

that colors as it turns, the pinwheel, the matter, the coming together

He uses one font for expressions, another for speech

Only his eyes are smiling

You don't want

what I'm hiding,

says the mother bird

as the   fox      draws near

What we

wanted

to find

wanted

to be found

Each time you spoke,

a document was created

The present is nothing more than anagrams of history

Mark Lamoureux

SHAVASANA

The day is glass

Hubris of named hours

A mantra powerful as a plant

What if the dead could vote?

The mighty limbs

The black nerves of the earth

Frame an isthmus of static

Blue & nostalgia the language of sundogs

Pools purple sugar

Water & the insect limbs of sweat

Discomfit a crown of daisies

A ring of poppies a corpse in the sun

Ringing. Silver slash of meteors

& pulverized diamonds

Dip of a beak, a proboscis

Into the moonstone vein

The clear eyes of fireflies

A fire in the dawn heat

A heart

The herm of a second

(LOVE IS LIKE) A HEATWAVE

after Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

Age comes on in the spring

inside                       a black egg

what happens to you

has no shape                       a slick

of magnolia tongues

a red old bruise on the flagstones

silky crush on strangers’ feet

somehow the humans keep coming

like it never gets old

the brass loop of fortune           every

available bird to the old

unreported dead tree           an orgasm

of ink on the grey

lawn            it’s always unawares

the cold of the salt sea the               wick

effect on the lake           the fires

burn on little boats in the dark

kaleidoscope          its bone tube

in the cloud rabbits          golden

for the age           not much

to complain about          because not

too much thought given          too many

laborious green flames

Diviner

The coffee is for the blackness

of the distended night, its two fucking

minds X-ing at a scissor-point.

This preening is a ritual death

repeated on the hour; the bolts

carefully plucked from the quiver

& broken across the knee.

Even Jackson Pollock staring

into his own raked face

the painting could not

destroy it. But even this

is apocryphal, a divining rod pointing not

at water but another rod

pointing up at it from under

the ground.

UTOPIA PKWY

Coltrane’s quotidian

            sun peeling

winter off everything

                      still cold

blue                but not me,

          a closed system

you might say—

                     my skin

is thick ,        but still

           the sun peers

inside & does its violence.

                      If I cannot

be human,

           why must I be

mortal?                     It’s black coffee.

              It’s legerdemain.

Consider this plain

            100,000 years thence—

wouldn’t it be easier

           to just eat things

from the grass & have nothing

           to say?

Because I honestly

           have nothing to say;

you will begin to drift

          toward

                     the margins, all lit up

by the day

           like it could not be

any different; some

           make a big deal out

of shutting up—

                                 I don’t.

SUN SHIP

Sun ship

           for a bier

Stone grey heads nod

           goodbye

Stars melt

          into a joke

                    a line of feathers

into the next universe

           It will be

                      nothing

like writing

                    A cradle

of atoms

                    A voice

A call

                   A gold circle

of the others expanding

           like a song

Patricia Carragon

subways

In this underworld,

my mood gets lost

in bullshit.

All streets and avenues

fell off the map I carried

since childhood.

The subways to my aorta

have different routes

under destruction.

I study new schedules,

but not one fits my mood.

Your perpetual eclipse

caterwauls on rails

& ingurgitated promises

travel via express.

The (E)sophagus takes them

to the rear end tunnel.

Your trust prefers the 3rd rail

& I switch for the (E) line

at 23rd & Ely.

Rubber Duckies

   

                        

                         rubber duckies, rubber duckies,

                         go down waterfalls, go down waterfalls,

                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls

                         into foam, into foam.

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim.

                         beer, beer

                         drips down waterfalls, drips down waterfalls

                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls

                         into foam, into foam.

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         happy, happy in beer,

                         happy, happy in beer.

                         lime slices, lime slices,

                         slide down waterfalls, slide down waterfalls,

                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls

                         into foam, into foam.

                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,

                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,

                         happy, happy, blub, blub,

                         happy, happy, blub, blub,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         happy, happy in beer,

                         happy, happy in beer.

                         lifeguards, lifeguards

                         dive down waterfalls, dive down waterfalls,

                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls

                         into foam, into foam.

                         lifeguards slurp it up, slurp it up, slurp it up,

                         lifeguards slurp it up, slurp it up, slurp it up,

                         drown happy in beer, drown happy in beer,

                         drown happy in beer, drown happy in beer,           

                         lime slices float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,

                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,

                         happy, happy, blub, blub,

                         happy, happy, blub, blub,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,

                         happy, happy in beer,

                         happy, happy in beer.

Jeroen Nieuwland

A try at raising raven

She grips the death of the bird lying bent out of shape, on a patch of grassy root; she has the bird by the wing; it has her by the fingertips; the wing folds back out as if one half lazarus; she calls it crow but does not know its proper name. An air, full with vacuum, from taut brightness of all sun. The feeling like her deep-inside shrill goddamn Descartes-man. The cloudless sky, tired, languid; the open sky, the openness around of field, and space for endless traveling sound that comes in flits & streaks of crisp, broken, horizontal sheets. She hangs herself. She climbs a partway tree; rests the broken raven onto a gnarling branch; two wings out for balance; expedited take-off. She hangs her front half back half over of the branch; angles from drapery to stiff upper body, knees tucked slightly inward, rudders; stretches flaps & wings her arms. For learn to fly, for learn the bird, for fly within the sky,

A try at cracking raven skull

Whether, if, might; whether it might. She is trying for a certain noise. The bones of the thing were already cracked; to the dust of the bones of the thing. She is testing, for one, a certain sound and, too, a grind of dust; a strip & slide of what does happen. It means, she cracks the skull against a root, she smacks the skull against a cement pavement. she does not do it for discomfort; this comfort; she rattles wracks & rats the skull; runs rats right thru, flit fast than said; the crow it twitches tenses; all she only did at first, is only look at. She cracks bones, shuffles dust, breaks her big bird test stuff. She cracks more bones, she shuffles dust, she mucks up big her bird test stuff; patches, smudges of big bird, flatter into a muck of shuffled dust; desists, interlaced with quiet panic, she tries to calm the goddamn open sky, it only widens vertigo, as if the sky at same time, zooms in, & steps mega back. She wishes at this juncture, near this root & concrete patch, a murder of crows, like feathers of a bird, was spread, in such an epileptic style, so she could try, in many times, the many ways a crow’s skull cracks, the dust grinds bones, the sun gets caught in beads, or twitch, or flitted feathers. Fatigued with bore, she gets; lands belly first, nose, forehead, flat on a patch of grassy root. Spreads arms flattens arms, outwards, flat into the dirt. Stretches legs, pushes toenails, into topsoil. Forgets her mind of mess of mucky feathers; becomes instead all twitcher, feeble flap, turtle flipping on its back; vacillations out of whack,

Petra Palm - images of Mulhouse

as it's a week ago today since we flew north

Petra's socialphotographer blog

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez

PERCEPTION

Heads flung back, their voices float

looking back on it, I’m lying

that I should see      (what bird/tree?)

much less something you sounded

urgent barely above a whisper, so I cast you

faintly seen from afar into doubt, you became

open space that lovely view shimmering across

Its only a leap

horseman in a sunbeam

but it feels so true, I’m charmed and wavy

associated with emerald, sapphires, fire

and opals like an agitated lover, an outsider

taut and incandescent, sucking words out of speeches

There’s confusion in the sequence of events

in this part of the country

it slips (or does it swell?) slippery in a swell swoon

having it done for you is not to you, unclaimed      home bound

An embrace has stunned me, rehearsal laughter

rooms in the infinitive, where the plot is poured on

I become rough and take on polyps – a poetic line

tomorrow and finally    we

I walked into the red room in a frenzy

your confessions, too, were weary and lapsed

hitting the floor hard

otherwise this stone       this curved breast

or paintbrush or strand of hair

descends layers of mating calls, the sutures aching

A word like chaperone stripped bare      extends

an intimate droplet

lusterless and amiss, the beauty of it

MOODY STUNNING LOOKS

In a strange sounding language I measured

heroism smudged with hypochondria

as you sensed your opportunity making its way

through my lunar cycle       I want to meet you!

Oh, “I want to meet you” is merely a piece of sexual pleasure

Beguiling paramours alight and slip       neck & head, wrists & throat

impede an angular collapse in heaps      Oh bracing heart!

An eyelash is an enchantment, an inner space

the shape of      slit      cantos       cunt      cusp      uncut jewels

the road through      wrenches free from flux

and ease, erases and shrivels

up your demeanor, your fascinating

large-format fumble

Elsewhere

the industrial landscape of Iceland

is encrusted with full-throated flyovers, oil refineries

wedding trumpets and tiny lights that swab

a promise      what looks like a

tinge

UNMISTAKABLY

Imperceptible and without realizing, we splayed kiss marks

on all the rooms, thus reinventing appealing spaces.

Without a backward glance, without you noticing

I turned around to admire these melodramatic noises.

What stars (unraveling)      What misgivings (feathery)

clustered in veiled circumference, this nomadic sequence!

Outskirts of a hastened ride spell a textural thicket:

shell, bone, feather, bare chest, hair pigment

flared out reflections, lizards and chalk, cranes

native of Flanders, a bellyful wielding, caught in.

Part of this is panting, tepid and predetermined

like a nasal voice or the shape of a palm of a hand

and part is clenched in accordion folds

opening over the linear lowlands of agitated sea fowl.

But what downy bracelet of crotch, pelvic burrows slide!

What meticulous soft impressions happened that night!

Sarah Lariviere

dear reader,
in publishing these pages from Sarah's lovely chabook i make the one exception to my rule for this month on not republishing things
             enjoy,
              your guest editor

Pearl Pirie

hurry-up-and-wait’s a handy tourniqueted phrase

10x more moose seen on polar fleece in a day
than I will ever see in life.

a vibration, glass against glass. gradual shift into contact?
or a truck has struck our building?

it comes without a drought,
the earthquake we waited from birth for.

       yet Yangze’s flood, yet Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing,
       Farran's Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette,
       yet Santa Cruz, Sheek's Island, Wales, and Woodlands*,
       yet slash and burn, yet cutting firewood, yet export, yet
       900 square miles more per year of desert in China yet
       tens of thousands of square kms of James Bay Project

and Eeyou Istchee. yet we make deals with our disasters.
hide them as a dog-dig after a squat, off at a trot.

water in flat circles drawn by fingertips on arborite
dries, leaves only what was before. a table

       is not a water table, is not a dripping tap, is not an upending
       is not a relativity caught in 22 depending, is not an industrial
       cap on pollution that may impact consumer-end pricing
       is not the simple habit of being a bother, of calling
       of emailing, of talking priorities to MP until blue in this case
       yet progress? point made yet to the indifferent friends?

is it for the sins of our overdesire, underdiscrimation
that Lionel Rithie’s Say You, Say Me plays over the cashier?


(*the villages that were flooded to make the St. Laurence Seaway Project)



counting your toes backwards

in Chinese I arrive at yī with one
toe to go. cheeks pinch red. what did I miss?
let's not mistake this  for a spontaneous
growth. a sidelong glance for the lines or space
to the sides  of your eyes to surmise what
you've caught. words, or only the fond squeezes?
you are slack-necked, calm receiving. I give
your wee-est piggie its definitive
name, líng, with a peck, a thanks for the safe
bays between these shaggy dedos of home.

rob mclennan

In case I find a tiny minute,

for Kathleen Fraser,

           when no letters fall like leaves

                       Artie Gold, before ROMANTIC WORDS

1.

A thudding silence, greets. Child-sized. Pure lyric energy, like watery spaghetti.

2.

My passion, dipped. To shine, on shoulders. As a sentence to be, primarily.

3.

Improbable yearning. Unyieldly chainsaw, lupins. Now that, even names. Crushing and regarding.

4.

Am I not to take this personally, somehow. Pull up your socks, as you say. This very minute.

Lary Bremner

Elegy Recipe

                                ( for Susan Yarrow & Kathryn MacLeod )

“The language is a city, to the building of which

every human being brought a stone.” - Emerson

“I‘m gonna tear your playhouse down.” - Ann Peebles

*

In this way the endless distracts. Naming

Language-self, a moon not so much

Groundless as floating as

Upon its own viscosity. We are

All for October. Seasons arising, contend-

Ing in harvested buzzwords, drawn to

Truck stops, the particle’d aggregate

Commerce of any given meaning recombines.

A braided emptiness

Of burns & binds. Adjust as you will

The lydian filter of habit, enforce a sweet & aphasic

Funk, suds the detour with difference. We

Find ourselves hunkered-down here in these

Chromatic cells of an ecstatic soup-kitchen, reading

Everything out of anything into no thing. It

Isn't even wasn't ever ours -- the 'center

Does not hold'. We fell in & in with it, gave

Way to the undertow. Joyous & ill, 'facts'

Built lingo condos on the aeon bluffs o’er the sea.

Diminishing the mileposts won't remove the dark beyond;

Threading the speech but soaps

The same old drum; a shadow likeness cannot

Clip the links. Accessories after the fact of love’s little neck-

Brace. The thing is, we said, it stares right back.

Robert Kelley, that language is already

A second language; Joris, similarly ‘foreign’; bp took

Collective syntax deep inside the letter.

Another way, Charles B.‘s non-absorptive. Hence Z’s

80 Flowers, eighty copies hence. All undertow

In the tidal sea of poesy’s (f)acts.

On the plane over to Japan I had the simple thought I am going

To learn to speak. Eventually, etymology

Splinters until such time as

A package of cultural assumptions contained

Becomes incorporated, & the carnie-hyphenation

Speaks louder than Shinjuku neon.

Cognitive slippage, aphasia, ink

Sextants & early map-making, charts holed-up

Alone. Poetry’s combinatory

Tonality evokes a reaction to existence itself.

Identify with & own the virus, feverish

In a ‘paradox of the reflective’

Most common poetic reading strategy is the ahem

Implanting of rhetorical device of analogy / metaphor,

Excerpting anything in amen(d)

Fits. Epistemological

Methodology, diagnostics, an enunciated ego

Versus the academe, the brilliant, brilliantly articulated, false.

You’re the doctors.. you tell me. You da

Mission operatives: every other possible path is,

By necessity of going, abandoned. Imp-

Losion, compressing love’s labour to a black hole. Ex-

Plosion, “tearing things & persons apart,” said

Rae Armatrout. When it all starts

To break down, we might be forgiven for thinking that

What is true is what we tell ourselves is true. Behind any of these

Strategic veils, a writer may appeal to me

Because places me in newer confusion, inserts stent in my stunt heart.

I am so damned tired anyway of my own school-of-exile patterns,

Categorical fishnets & slackening skin.

English in vogue but out of a job, surfing the mall in its Air argots.

Leisure’s chin music. Precise jargon for that group of speakers, ack-flak

To others. Tall, tropical gates open the deep riot, time.

I had, then, the grasp of it from your letters, from the banks of my

Habitation, my Gaelic kanata. Self-expression an imitation of

Colonial wig. Please bear with us these our

Heavy losses. God’s intimate murmur to the young apple

People in their young apple youth. A gallon of lifeblood spills from the local theatre, Blue Hawaii at the Cedar-V Theater, Lynn Valley, NVan.

I would, in loyalty, abandoned even fair Killgaligan, my cow & stone Croft, to meet this calamity. I am a famished instrument of six filthy straws. There are notches in these potatoes like corpses

In the field. Liken them to natsukashii television references, quickly dated

As what’s behind door #3. A&R men head for the hills, seeking re-Constructive moonshine. Hoist

The slogan & sip it not gingerly, the whole throng

Locked into a rising inflection, a fairy banshee, a keening

Wail, a greenback Socred anti-distillation.

To those who would say there is play within any

Totalizing system: kindred garten implies plenitude. A web-surfing analogy inevitable in the post-muscle car, post-comp. age,

Bound to abound, but the sum of opacity is always

Night. Atari mae premise, portmanteaux of a

Personal desperation. Symptomatic

Meanwhiles exit from the eyes like skyhook

Devices, phrases pushing rehabilitative putty in a prison-tattoo way.

Miscommunication chamber, the density

Of a voice on an errand of ‘real’ import. Inhalation sound,

Collapsed cargoes of the word-instrument have

Made of us these hemispheres, these unbalanced

Wings. We might as well associate with the jellyfish now, the new Giant man-eating Pacific squid. After much youthful bloom, embrace The chu-nen surmise & timely sagacious weeping, anon.

Was this all done by acts of staggering dust, crucial crux material, allusive dust-jackets, filmic trajectories & a litter of ration?

The more potent variations, were they

The digits in the ether, immigrants of an instant? Long

After Gertrude went up against the founding fathers, entire empirical faux-bouquet of personal anecdote.

The breath of the poets I had befriended is made of wide ripples

Of silt in a quilted black twist. Shifty thou remains, though,

A fluid reprimand in the name of the people,

The dream of north invaded by a lingua franca, a clutter

Of code-names in the luscious lowlands of total freedom. Tribal ex-

Pendable. All models have been recalled by GM, now GM,

Leaving only hubcap asterisks on the pavement.

Facade of an echo in the dub version looms again upright, invisible

But still within earshot, sown in the impromptu Venus-glitter of

Vegas casinos. Numbers tattoo the darkness; numbers

Have no past. Bless these anxieties, this issue of bromide treacle,

Aisles of melody seen from the maze-console. The aromatic

Ring of the tactile sanctum, the shaggy

Baby smell of writing. Its a mere hundred volts of slug to a preppy

Behaviorist. The such & such elicits the profound indifference of the

AV guy. Everything has become analogous to bureaucracy; economy

To the erotic valve of the page, the insatiate flow of history

As through a wind tunnel, an empire.

The storage of our slow dissolves turned out to be nothing more than

A binary séance of artifice. The actual radiance was sleeping

In the capillaries of flickering immortals

When (suddenly?) out burned the bulbs. Living on the fringe of

Tactic, the empty layered arcades of a prefabricated faith, sad

Peepshow & glory-hole. So,

You return to tramp the Lack District, come upon a typewriter

Stuck in the peat bog. Writ upon each passing cloud was the name for every form, every wild debris of weather. Call it

A sedation by over-stimulation, a deity lacking proper docs. Call it

The dance of neurology, aural & oracular intercom,

A yurt on the outskirts of reason.

As the film spreads, the close-up blurs. All passively, darkly, a Rejuvenation device emitted from the turbine of the throat, sensed

(At last!) through the acoustic Gnostic bones of the ear.

This house has zero plumbing & a scatter of carpet, its spores now

Turning to stump, to a kind of beginner’s music

With the high arch of attributes.

Know it as cell's liquid devotion, writing-map, a levee of time, rough Morning mind, useless sluice, diviner of starling flight

Pattern, image-shifter, the rattles in all that helmet room.

Ignorant as a stint in the army, you are given the files,

Moving vans to which you set your license in a bartering

Behavior that never ends.

Loss as a mark, needlepoint breaking the

Surface of glazed berry ex-stasis, the mess the night bred, yet

Impossibly happy by another's mouth.

Dawn in the basement, soul machinery gummed with ink, greenish Heartache in the echo circuitry, prodding the slug

To math, misting the vocals beyond cognition.

Swans on the radio, thrash up their Siberian homing sounds.

The simples require tending, a cold voltage of held-breath filing

Down the cogs as window-pane brackets moon.

I have this penchant for leaning out to the leftover hills, humming last Year’s hits & hoarding sleep for a rainy day. Space is all grit,

Thought a toxin habitat eaten with war.

*

Thankfully, you wake up one day

With a heart made of tacks. October bursts. Sounds much longer peel

Down the corridors; syllables sink deeper into

The cracked cup.

*