Terry Folz

Money does not make
amends.
Bedstead made for trend, unsent.
Cap and kettle.
Broom and yardstick.
A paisley color tie.
And mudstained flannel.
Redhead viral magazine page.
Everything squint-eyed.
Like the red and white check
tiles
at the Five Guys Burgers And Fries.
Design arrest.
Pregame foraged implant.
Bent coffeebooks
lean intrepid.
Crooked gray intransigent.
Milk is gonna go through the roof.
Latent.
Blatant.
Late.
And unsaid.
Chainropes make a splatter-drip canvas.
Snot.
And bloated cancer sacs.
Weekend electric.
Fire sauce.
And the mouth inside
peeled raw.
Dancebeat monotone.
And candy colored streetlight.
Ache-dry molar cold and
bloodless.
I think between the pages.
And walk frozen amid blood infused
days
of sleep.
The tamed and sullen songs of dirigibles
roiled, unthreaded.
Cave-chipped fire brick.
Rushing yards.
Silverspattered ash and a bowl of peanut shells,
half-consequential.
I hack and spit
and read unleavened yesterday's nowhere
newspaper.





Terrence Folz works as a standardized test scorer and has been performing poetry and spoken word in various Twin Cities forums for decades.

Mary Kasimor

blueberry jungle

 

through blinds uninvolved SEX WHITE

sheets Buddha WAITS. birdlike knitting

needles TWO drawers of socks undocumented

ROMANCE. violin Lilacs white FIRE a disabled zone

montana’s ELASTIC FATE blood running out. a

glutinous ass private speech food TAX white BREAD

parts CULTURE free blueberry jungle occuping

theater Free for ALL. grazing BUTTER flies tennis

fears UP Balls beach STAR stale loons parts

of PARTS mouse pieces agonizing thoughts feels

fate. PAT baggage. Casino HELL hallucinations old folks

educating Aristotle AVE. truck KING discovers

midwest SPIES. facebook Speed bumping DUCTS.

                                precocious river crows tough STONES

disposable IQ delicious CONTRAST poet central

potable MILK weed remote gloom locked. DIGS

absence spacious WIRED furniture blank face

fancy MONKEYs exchange easy car collecting

BABIES welfare. DITCH fusion furniture ex-ray talk

tough fate captures THEATER face.

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Kasimor is the March guest editor of Truck.

 

Being Simply Stupid by Jefferson Hansen

               “There is no such thing as language”
                                    — Mark Wallace

Feints & shivers against
a look in your eyes
that says something nasty
or not about a
game we may or may not
be playing.

Saying, “You’re sweating
against the cold &
this place is fun” meaning
whatever the hell she
didn’t know she
meant, I guess.

Thinking about language
is a diversion from
the action between your teeth.

A tongue clacks its way against red skin and white
Lips pop against every last glistening track of attempt
Our ears can go nowhere but haywire
Sound refracts and clatters through the thickness of air

And you can only write
when sleep dogs
your periphery &
you wish against
the spring-loaded
clicks of the keyboard:

someone is watching
you someone is always
watching
you

I talk the game of my deepest forgettings hidden
somewhere in grottoes never marked beneath
mountains long lost inside ribs that
hurt to heave & still do it

I
I want to tell you something
that trips at my
latest last glistening &
I see you outside
something invisible & thorned
I can only speak the echoes
from my lost caverns—
can they clatter
and curve into what
you I think need to hear

Sound travels better in water
molecules packed so closely
banging into your chest
your eardrums

We end where we begin
in water
puckering and putrid
wailing against the drip incessant
whimpering at the erosion of
skin and scale

life gathers and sickens
but somehow, somewhere
you knew to pass the berries
for my sponge cake & 

we smile as unknowing &
dumb as the toxins we carry

nothing else matters but your
lips, your lipstick, your shy
white teeth &, for now,
I hold out for being simply stupid 

 

Jefferson Hansen is the author of the novel …and beefheart saved craig (BlazeVox) and Jazz Forms (Bluer Lion), a selected poems. He is the editor of the Internet arts journal AlteredScale.

Colin Herd

rope

a close-up of the cliff edge.

michael’s gone for ice cool

plum. there’s a sparse little

tuft of grass, and a faint

sliver of lichen.

a hand tentatively grasps

its way into the shot, with

dirty finger nails. orangey

dirt. it helps to lever his

head into view, with matching

helmet and grey-black straps.

he sighs deeply, like gargling.

you see two other people quite

a bit further down, looking up.

one in blue and one in red, letting

out more rope from a pulley.

as the rope goes through the

clip, its whinney out-castratos

the wind.

the top guy clips a carabiner

onto a nut and starts pulling up

the rope. he looks round at the

two below and gives them a

thumbs up. they start to relax.

Colin Herd was born in 1985. His first book 'too okay' was published in 2011, and a chapbook came out the same hear called 'like' (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). Poems, reviews and articles have been published in a wide range of digital and print publications including Jacket2, Shampoo, HTMLGIANT, 3:AM Magazine, Chroma, Aesthetica and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Jesse Glass

Propositions & Commentary


A. Propositions:

I walk to the other day and I wait

For the Archons to answer. You send me a card

With four seed packets stapled to it. It


Is the hour of u,n,d,e,r,s,t,o,o,d. Still we

Do notice the changes, subtle as they are—yes:

“All the [ ]nges of [ ] pheno [ ] world.”

As you’d once, famously, described it.


Shadows thrown by rain- swollen spokes roll

Through us, are not us. Any miraculous radiance

We could catch in our bones


would linger with us now if it existed (It

doesn’t ). We agree to be more

than those signaling in the street, to transform ourselves, to

translate our cries of defiance into higher


registers. But do not believe what’s written

by this hand: this is a world of ill-defined

interiors, tin-work skies. I [we] pull bare shoulders back


before an age-dappled mirror: & remind myself [ourselves]:

those were your words

written in cursive flames? Your cursive scars? It is only because I [we]


care that I [we] repeat them—rather imagine these

press-on letters. It is only because X because N

because Q that I [we] came from the Aeons to be canted


along the front rooms of an abandoned farm house

(the scene of a continuous murder—note the handprints

bleeding on the wall)

that I [we] might speak

of the original, song-torn mouth and of

the streak of a,n,o,m,a,l,o,u,s,

light on a photograph that was said to have

flummoxed the aging Houdini (It didn’t);

or a tongue with an arched tip: sign of genetic fortune.



B. Commentary

heat drags at the outlines
of our bodies as we fall

toward each other. cantering
in slow motion, heads unhelmeted, we

pull at the glowing reins. heat
is another presence in our skins,

causes our pores to weep, then
welter in red seas. & always

the anger latent in these bricked-in
humors, the body’s edifices

quivering like the flesh around a superannuated eye.
this weight I lift is my personal regard

for you. at 10:45 P.M. it begins to rain
on a dying horse, steam

rolling back from its skull like a blanket
of lace.




Jesse Glass has lived and worked for over 20 years in Japan.

Michael Farrell

Telephone, Kettle Affects

 

The telephone’s writing a play. ‘How do

you do?’ it begins. ‘G’day.’ Absurd, says

the face of the critic, whose been championing

the return of that mode. The telephone

purrs, apparently happiest when working. Its

colour, however, indicates the deepest shame.

The kettle is a metal model, needing fire to

come to life. Plastic models are calmer and

say milder things. This one doesn’t hurry

yet the climax is an event each time. People

come running, as to an awaited phone call.

The first has the face of a doctor: firm but

sympathetic, prescribing herself a hot drink. 

The scene is written into the play with a

twist: the kettle lights its own matches.






Michael Farrell lives in Melbourne. He coedited Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann) with Jill Jones. His latest publications are open sesame (Giramondo) and enjambment sisters present (Black Rider).

 

 

George J. Farrah

Redaction


the fluid which is light which is liquid which is

glass which is heavy with cuts and danger

to move it in sheets which fit in dust

which move through printing

and paint or they are moving behind it

safe and in continual danger to watch

their weight go away separate

come back as a color a smudge on our side or their side

the light is on their side or our side but cuts in between if they

move or drive or stop and

recover the lid the direction

and remember the turns or the lights when

they were talking weren't talking

it remembered for them a smudge

of color on the walls on the doors

an opening in the spoon in the

telephone in the rain

to sell it not immediate not money not sold

not numb like the lake rim opening on it pleasure

or pressure in the toes on the air in it or around

swans or ducks that anger not selling pressure or

pleasure that die opening to follow them

not sold yet a flew an ached to swallow pressure

a whole a break clearing in the grain in a race

not looking not on a door not a lime or a stack

through





George J. Farrah received an MFA from Bard College, NY.

Book forthcoming from Ravenna Press, The Low Pouring Stars

His work has appeared in The Washington Review, Open 24 Hrs., Ribot, BUGHOUSE, Fourteen Hills, Disturbed Guillotine, Tight, Aileron, Fish Drum, The Columbia Poetry Review; Caldron And Net, Moria , CROWD, Xstream, MORIA, Ampersand, Elimae, Blaze VOX, BHOuse vol.2, Blue and Yellow Dog, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Los Magazine, Anemone Sidecar and others.

Jesse Glass

Monkey Mother

Forgive us Monkey Mother
As we drive our chisels
into monumental clefts
To hew a non-falsifiable surety
Soon scoured away by typhoon & meteorite,
Pulverized by a desert breath. Forgive us
As we raze wooden idols raised in your honor
To lift phalluses of steel against your eternal day
& power our garbage scows out beyond break-waters
To drop tokens of our disdain into your terrible unknown
While others cooly pull apart the products of your fecundity
In laboratories, hospitals, butcher shops
& tap their ashes into wounds that yet feel
& sever viscera that yet distends to accommodate breath.

O we have risen up against you. Our brainpans
Forced your thighs apart & we laid screaming in your shadow.
You bent the grids of your face above us & we softened
You called us angel: we relaxed our sphincters
& shat plutonium upon the earth.

Now all things reek of our madness. We grope ourselves
At the terminus of the city, polish that monument
To pain with sacks of pulverized teeth.
You wag your finger in our faces
Yet we twist the screw through the metal plate just the same.

The moon bears witness to business-faced minions
Leveling mountains by atomic bomb
So yet another city can be fashioned
On rotting pylons driven into gravel, bones, and cesium
As you stand dispassionately on my window sill,
Fresh water & milk in plastic cups before you
One ceramic hand lifted in benediction
Thumb & forefinger fused in a pallid ring. Propped
Beside you a yellowing photograph of your long-
Forgotten manifestation: an old woman
Holding an infant in summer: My earliest self sad-eyed there,
Breathing the scent of my grandmother.

Monkey mothers gather their delicate, bisque-headed charges
& drag them near though they foul themselves in fear
Gather their cries to leather teat-ends
Broken by flea-bites beneath dull fur
& give suck though it pains them.
Lift their charges close to scabbed nostrils
& run a languid paw along their spines,
Exploring the nervous ribs, scratching the tiny bellies.

Their infants stop shrieking & soon
Assume the sleep of planetary dust as Monkey Mother
Looks up at the clouds & cracks a flea
Delicately between her teeth. She will balance this way
Beside the trembler for hours. She will lift the wizened little creature
Onto her back & climb into the highest branches of the trees
& resume her vigil, biting her knuckles, pulling her swollen
Dugs. She will stare into the night for danger as her baby
Tumbles thru darkness of animal dreams, tumbles
Through Bardos, watching the Forms shift astonishing fire
Before its uncomprehending gaze.

Mother—your blacked eyes swollen lip
Thrown out by Monkey Father in the snow
Dressed in pink nightgown that you’d bought to please him,
Pleading from window to window
To be let back in. We could not help you. We lay
Gobbing back tears in the dark as we heard your voice rise
Above the January wind. We tried to imitate stone & bone
As we curled on our sides & sucked our thumbs & held our eyes shut tight.
Forgive us your freezing fingers, thickened chest & nipples,
Your insteps stung by viper head cold.
& When you were let back in by Monkey Father,
Forgive men for the rest of that night.
Forgive us all.




Jesse Glass has lived and worked for over 20 years in Japan.

Dan Ryan

Design Topic

In the Grand Design

of things

There was in fact

no designer.

All the elements

of existence

Formed

a single body.

 

Afterthot

As far as I know

there is no afterlife

that I have personal knowledge of

via personal experience.

 

Perhaps I've merely forgotten.

 

 

 

 

After spending an extensive number of years attempting to save the world from itself while living in

Olympia, Washington, Dan Ryan followed his sweetie to Minnie's Apple Crisp, Missinota in July 2012. Determined to approach life from a more obtuse angle, he is now a thoroughly committed Zen slacker, practicing guilt-free attachments to hanging out in coffee shops, reading all the wrong books, writing poetry, and enjoying other sensual pleasures. No longer in search of truth, he is instead looking for a good fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Nelson

Paul Nelson/Bio

Paul Nelson is founder of SPLAB in Seattle and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. He wrote a collection of essays, Organic Poetry and a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, WA, A Time Before Slaughter (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger.) One of his main writing projects currently is the next chapter of the history-in-verse mode of the Slaughter poem entitled Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia.

He interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Wanda Coleman, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles, George Bowering, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, Brenda Hillman, Emily Kendal Frey & many Cascadia poets.

He has presented his poetry and poetics in London, Brussels, Vancouver, Qinghai, and Beijing, China, Victoria, Nanaimo, Lake Forest, Illinois and other places & writes an American Sentence every day.

Ann Neuser Lederer

Ornate Molds

Disguised by ornate molds, sewn to their footpads, little fringes.

Dog troupes in tutus whistled to bears in their polished paws.

Blaze orange and phosphorescent, dottings

of dark and palpable spongy spores continue to cling to crevices:

throats, and their ilk.

Lichens adhesions crusts corrosions: the plaques of goodwill.

Outside, the sadness of trees in a row.

Animals appeared where they should not be:

a possum fell out of the ceiling.

Raccoon meandered where rabbit would have flit.

Out in the yard, dogwood budded too early,

reburied tulips fooled by a thaw.

Artifacts of teatimes: market spice, saltines and soft, sourdough cookies.

A slinging of tambourines.
Heed me they plead in hints, feathery films where they should not grow.

Stubborn, audacious yeasts still flutter,

gnats on the rims of syrup bottles

Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio and has also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky as a Registered Nurse. Prior to nursing she studied art and earned degrees in Anthropology. Her nonfiction and poetry appear in online and print journals; anthologies such as Bedside Guide, A Call To Nursing,  The Country Doctor Revisited, and Best of the Net; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies.

 

Jasper Brinton

composite 

Tell us not pink

at issue after the flesh—

Clouds started off late

vehicles edited the boundaries

engines took expression.

Delayed—we washed the presence

mourned the negative drift

told ourselves well done

travelled with fissionable material

sparked with displayed ecstasy.

                    The plan auto-assembled
                    similar circuit and resistances

so prolific  morningless

we were awed by a rush to physics

our cursive slumber pixelated.

                    The once adjusted burdened

a quoted eternity—narrativized

lines of oblivious structure

strewn messages behind wire.

Then the mountain fell to waves

slipped leeward became emulous

antithetical almost mesostic

such was our hard passion

wreckage on people’s lips

why the room given rightfulness

disturbed even industrious childhood.

The letter P translucent—mosaic

pivoted with the everyday panic

—I spell the savior it warned

so we wanted to say go gold

stone isn’t christ-bearing as life

self-fashioned beyond wilderness

the wilderness of a mass place

a thickness for corroded death.

 

 

 

 

 

Jasper Brinton born in Alexandria Egypt, was educated in the Middle East, Scotland and the United States. Over the years he has worked in publishing, printing, architecture, ceramics and wood.  He lives near Kimberton, Pennsylvania in a restored schoolhouse and sails the Chesapeake in an old but seaworthy sloop. His poetry has appeared in Eccolinguistics and On Barcelona.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Ryan

Minions and Onions...January 2013

We…

Me and my girl Mary…the Muffin Queen herself

blastin westward on I-70 across the crazy American Heartland of our dreams

far gone into conclusion we’d reach Old Santa Fe tomorrow

auricularly grooving on Reverend Raunch and the Dope Smokin Alter Boys

current devas of the Bible Beltway

They…

the minions of the mid west... from the prairie of the Great Plains…

veins flowing with the dust of that sacred and holy geography…

(Mary’s geography, actually, herself bein of the prairie)

“ Let us meet amongst the minions on the field of onions"  I suggest

“ How delicious! “ says she…” Minions and onions…I’ll make soup"

the minions being salt of the earth, poisoning the soil

(and onions)

of the mid - American continent…Ohio to Kansas

OH, HOLY KANSAS…

from which Dorothy and Toto are on permanent vacation from…

where mad Americans drunk on the fear of living

beg the great questions of death…

”If you die today where will you spend ETERNITY?”

 (when you die you’re just dead…that’s it)

reptilian visionaries…what a weary bunch…

willingly waiting in line for misery at the fundamentally evangelical

Church of the Rude Awakening

(House of the Un-risen Son to unbelieving unbelievers like me)

congregated by a woebegone pitiful congregation

heads bent in worship of the existently non-existent

talking in low, whining voices

repeating over and over again “ yes…yes…yes. “

and so forth…

(I sensed the madness it put in them)

with expectant expectation for a Kansas resurrection crucifiction

(it was such fun the first time, why not again – a jucy crucy?)

violence bein a Christian - American tradition…

mad crazy Americans are addicted to it…

speakintongues holyrollin Christian soldiers

mouthfrothin ready to kill for Christ, mom and her apple pies

no thought given to indecisive indecision

mindfully gripping an ephemeral sense of a real unreality

it’s what happens when you start losing your mind…

individually and collectively

We (again)…

Me and my girl Mary…the Muffin Queen herself

in a furiously flurry of agreed upon decisions

whereby deciding Holy Kansas to be Creep City

roar off at maximum boplicity across the remaining portions of

the Sunflower State

(leavin slack-jawed gaping faces in our absence)

out-pulling the gravity of fear inherent in the inheritance of the

generally mad to be saved populous

onward and outward bein my motivational motto

out, out and away from that holysacredcow con game

no desire to travel that heavengoing highway to hell with

a busload of wingnuts

I also apparently suffering no unwillingness to sit

in soundly closed-minded judgement - without guilt or reservation…

the Muffin Queen keeping mum on the subject as we roll on into Colorado

 

 

After spending an extensive number of years attempting to save the world from itself while living in Olympia, Washington, Dan Ryan followed his sweetie to Minnie's Apple Crisp, Missinota in July, 2012. Determined to approach life from a more obtuse angle, he is now a thoroughly committed Zen slacker, practicing guilt-free attachment to hanging out in coffee shops, reading all the wrong books, writing poetry, and enjoying other sensual pleasures. No longer in search of truth, he is instead looking for a good fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

Eric Elshtain

“Wooing the Mazoo” (“We must obey the time,” Othello I.iii)

Put money in thy purse

follow thou the wars

offices’ most solvent pockets

lambent circles off officers’

helmets like coins keep

hooplas blooming, candying

over eyes sequins paraded

under-dressed as our girls

and all the pettifogs agree:

in the coarse events

selectmen choose in smoke

as we gestured empty

behind our curtainties

arranged before our being,

dream realms ghosted embrasures

sickened Quakers dropped

arrows from as mad captains

hammer doubloons to masts

follow thou the quavering

cables to mermaid’s purses—

put your money on.

Make faces hatcheries

for our kind of fresh hell.

Strum up some becomings

within the next stun-

gunned chest: freak crisp

chiefs—whatever spends—

for stuffs she chuckled,

air forced diaphragm deep

it ain’t over it ain’t over

lover—my cause is hearted—

put it to your pursed lips

sweet; sweat foreclosures

and get stinko’d as we fiddle.

The news fills us up in gold

as the rest crawl for crumbs.

Eric Elshtain is a homemaker and also the poet-in-residence at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital and UIC Hospital where he conducts poetry and art workshops with patients through Snow City Arts. He also teaches literature at the Better Boys Foundation in Chicago. Elshtain's poetry, reviews, and interviews can be found in McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary, Interim, Salt Hill, GutCult, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Fact-Simile, Kennesaw Review, and other print and on-line journals. He has a book forthcoming from Verge Books and has been the editor of Jon Trowbridge's on-line Beard of Bees Press since 2001.

Martha Deed

Morris Island Mockingbird

 

The Mockingbird on the road to Morris Island
does not sit on a fence, but rather on a metal
lobster trap though if there are lobsters off Cape Cod
I am unaware

Unaware of this bird’s ancestry
socioecomic status
party affiliation
or its reason for perching near this road
on the way to a military installation
or whether it is on Homeland Security’s
No Fly list

It does not fly when I approach
document its presence on top of the lobster trap
which in turn sits on a pile of gravel
the provenance of the gravel
also unknow

But the mystery of its age
clears with the wind
that ruffles its feathers
exposing the down underneath

too young to carry a gun
but perhaps old enough to mimic
the auto alarm sirens on Clinton Avenue
as sung by its long-dead relatives
in South Nyack, New York

Mimus polyglottos, 10 in (25 cm)

 

 

 

 

 

Martha Deed recently completed a mixed-genre book of poetry and primary documents to reconstruct her daughter, Millie Niss's death in a community hospital, The Last Collaboration (Furtherfield, 2012) and editing Millie's poetry collection, City Bird (Blazevox, 2010).  She has five previous chapbooks: The Lost Shoe, The November 2010 Project, and This is Visual Poetry all from Dan Waber's imprints, 65 x 65 (small chapbook project), and #9 (Furniture Press).  Her poems have been published in Shampoo, Moria, Edifice Wrecked, CLWN WR, Big Bridge, On Barcelona, and many others. Her website: www.sporkworld.org/Deed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jasper Brinton

 

moue

 

Outside

appearances are outages

invisible pigmentation

consider writing time split

cracking shells split nuts

exclaim today’s catalogue

dear reader—inks are heavenly

someone’s arbitrary constancy

before the poor terrapin

tergiversates the landline

and if hereabouts the list dulls

try a new pinch of dry herb

effacement builds the kernel

the log for surrogate paper

 

 

 

 

 

Jasper Brinton born in Alexandria Egypt, was educated in the Middle East, Scotland and the United States. Over the years he has worked in publishing, printing, architecture, ceramics and wood.  He lives near Kimberton, Pennsylvania in a restored schoolhouse and sails the Chesapeake in an old but seaworthy sloop. His poetry has appeared in Eccolinguistics and On Barcelona.