Truck: 2015

edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

thanks to: Jelena ANDJELOVSKI, Maxine CHERNOFF, Yoko DANNO, Trane DeVORE, Anne ELVEY, Marcus GRANDON, Natsuko HIRATA, Cynthia HOGUE, Kiyoko OGAWA, Steven SEIDENBERG, Jeffrey SIDE, Hideko SUEOKA, Susan Laura SULLIVAN, Cyril WONG and Mark YOUNG

dear TRUCK readers,

Thanks to Halvard Johnson for inviting me to curate the December 2015 TRUCK.

Fifteen poets in Australia, England, Japan, Serbia, Singapore, and the U.S.A. responded to a call for work / work in progress on the subject of “incompleteness” / “the world is not enough.”

I present their work in the following order: GRANDON (cover art, above) followed below by poetry from HOGUE, SEIDENBERG, ELVEY, YOUNG, CHERNOFF, DANNO, WONG, SUEOKA, JORITZ-NAKAGAWA [myself], SIDE, ANDJELOVSKI, HIRATA, DeVORE, SULLIVAN, and OGAWA, concluding with artist biodata for everyone.

CYNTHIA HOGUE

(“to be-frend”)

– (Defense of) ≠ (Connect to)
– Fortified in the house: “la femme à la fenêtre”
– “the most poetical topic in the world” –
– Here’s freedom, C ≤ ONE’S OWN ROOM ≥
– good frend, I’ll lock you out –

Damn Spot

(Lady Macbeth)

Between room

and sky

a curtain falls.

Not much visible, audible.

Cloud-outlines. Horn

toots. A truck farts

(backfires). Inside the carpet’s

red’s wet, menstrual,

the spot welling like

the heart that is full,

dry wall so easily

punched through,

though no one’s face.

Not this time.

No one to face.

After a Rape

for D.B.

Fractures the

person you

were after which

there’s no (you )

Forget to converse

Waking confuse name

Sever sometime hence

Violated you because

– could –

Uncomfortable feeling for

Spirits come in dreams

Talk in – spells –

Words you don’t know

if they speak to –

or cure – you –

A magpie looks – after

You – mend –

may – Beneath

integument the cord of –

you – holds fast

STEVEN SEIDENBERG

from Grenzbegriff

Blue tines open, milk wash curdled

to the bluing page.

The indigence of the infinite,

unlike that of the eternal,

not proportioned to its transience,

to the transport of its transience

thus eternally presumed.

What, you ask of something

you call deed against the logos,

of that trickle in the transverse

that opposes

that it’s turned,

allows the stricken gist to fix

its opposite as ornament,

remarked the sludge and welter

of this cordon of the ontic, first

and featly flung in suffering

but equally

disport.

Who, that is, could feed the world’s

emptiness

feed the world

its emptiness

while cobbling its nature the

concealing

of its mode,

then fit the sky its shoe of night

by buckle, blue with stars—

And fondled (that’s

the word for it, for every

schism cut to fit

its carapace a line)

open (that’s

the name for it, each

digit forms

innumerate

a lobulated

tongue)

to carry off

the space between

the once and final

echo and

the silence that

portends the hearkened

vow against

the flood—

ANNE ELVEY

Break

Break the thread of it

the strung mat(t)er sung

harp of it. Break it—

her need spooling you—

the all of it. Break

the you of it, the sprung

no of it, the emptied I

of it. Break the thread

of her need, the temple

throb of it. Break it.

It tears. Test the fray

of it. The fray of you

and of me. The needle’s

eye held to the light.

Moisten the frayed end.

On driving inland from the Great Ocean Road

Steep wind and cloud—

sun glints on grains

of friable splendour, the budge

of things unmade and made.

The roo is unseen but its mate’s

prone form is so like the animal

we are—each in the flung

surprise of rigor toward

acceleration. A human scene

unravels with every potholed

species. Against the night’s

road train dna

persists. We can taste

no more and toss the last

home grown tomato

into the quarantine bin.

Next morning the sun

makes branchwork lace

that lyrics itself as we eye it.

The wind ruffles the light.

Thimble

In each

indentation for

a needle—to spare

a finger

or the thumb—

I have placed

a speck of soil

and sown the least

of seeds.

What grows

is fey—the kind

of garden sold

at Sunday markets

or worn on hats

for Oak’s Day.

When it rains

a Rivendell sprouts

like the allure

of a cultural

invasion.

MARK YOUNG

To introduce the invented cousin

The poolpump clicks

off & nothing is silent.

Later we went for a walk

beside the train lines.

You read to me from

a book you found

growing in a bright

purple bougainvillea.

I didn’t recognize

the text. Brecht.

The Good Person of

Szechwan. You took

all the parts. Small birds

provided the punctuation.

They / both wound / up eating pasta

The testimonial banquet is

full of public places, most

of them associated with

errands. Anonymous plants

grow between the cracks,

a piano tuning delay sends

small waves of water over

the street. Toronto's die-

hard Batman fans enter

into a dialogue with a dead

cop found on the sidewalk

below an apartment window.

Her prose is flattened, much

like an unpressed tuxedo.

A line from Yoshindo Yoshihara

Never rewarded for it,

but she was a virtuous

woman. Some element of

luck involved, something

to do with the mutual

repulsion of grease &

water. Otherwise she was

carnivorous, capable of

short bursts of speed,

leaving what was left

of her prey behind as

long sweet roots. These

were later made into that

hard black paste used

during the Renaissance as

both flavoring & canvas

size. Move closer to the

painting, press your nose

against the glass that now

protects it. Deep breaths.

MAXINE CHERNOFF

Curtain

In rooms of sleep

your silent witness
is a glove, blue with

density as a summer lake.

On a light-speckled landing,
you turn to observe
the view, finding a gap
that isn't as much window
as bent mirror.
Prophetic curtains
enchant the absence

with a vocal breeze
and notion of a plan.
What you thought
a fault line
removes the capable

earth, blistering desire.
An orb of sleep lifts you

before the flood of rushing
error sweeps the
the scene. Complacent
and composed you carve
the perfect window,
light arriving for
the hour of its framing.

Legend

To live in a comma,

caesura of consciousness

washed by an afternoon

of close listening, bent,

as bodies incline toward

a locus of light, adept

at glistening as herald or star.

Who says existence when

when towns are buried and history

ties us to minerals stored

in a hermit’s dark cell?

You are chained to remorse,

grow perilous feathers

as day lifts its cover and

the dangers of nightfall

are buffed bright.

Night is a piano,

darkness its minor keys.

Ghosts witness

the retreat of the song.

YOKO DANNO

Pebbles to Pigeons

on the riverside wild pigeons come flying

from nowhere―i have nothing to feed them,

no crumbs, no seeds, no words, but watch

them picking at wet pebbles , or edible gems

the way the sound buzzes

in my ears is threatening

shaggy peaks shine before sunset,

lava erupts from a crack of smile

i think, therefore i am,

who said that? my mind

is outside my heart as if

churned in a washing

machine

memories rise, precarious scenes absorbed,

changed, filtered, through a myth-making

process as benign air comes through the ozone

layer; what you wanted to be is the issue

Time to Leave

i drank green tea & orange juice,

and finally finished with red wine

autumnal leaves tinged my brain,

“don’t sleep in the rain, my dear”

a stranger standing at the back door

of my house asked for a bowl of herb

tea―for years, he said, he’s been trying

to sing after his vocal cords was excised

cups and glasses unwrapped,

cloths still hanging in the wardrobe,

bundles of goods for removal

on the floor

stop falling sakura, I’m not ready yet

to leave

staring into a crystal ball is no avail

in looking for hair-pins or the future

FLOWER PASSAGES

Wisteria

flowers

almost

touching

the ground,

I knit

a pullover

for my lover,

the yarn not long enough

to complete the fancy pattern

Lingering in my overgrown garden,

I found thistles to my taste,

dry nettles not,

pears resemble avocados

only in shape…I realized

I didn’t know what on earth I was

Men were digging a ditch along a sasanqua

hedge―“Why is this necessary here?”

One of the workers mumbled, “To support

families in need―to keep us going…”

A black swallowtail fluttering

from a mist of orange blossoms

revealed to me an empty hallway

through a crack in the closed door,

a shaft of sunlight piercing the dark

CYRIL WONG

For J

The last thing I wished to do

was write about you, but here we are:

spiraling from drug-addled panic,

a final solution to that voice in your head

(maybe God made you do it),

loneliness and despair too much to bear,

or all of the above, you flung yourself

off the highest floor of a building

and what I’m left with is the night

you shouted at me for not paying attention

to the other presence in the hotel room

you accused me of refusing to hear,

the one who teased you for liking me,

and winning every argument because, frankly,

he never gave a shit what you thought

or whether I was deaf or not.

Forgive me for not saying more,

for saying nothing, for leaving you

alone with that bastard I too wished

I might never hear. (What did he say

the rest of the morning as sunlight

murdered the shadows at your feet?)

I could have done nothing more for you—

this isn’t just a lie I tell myself.

After I heard the news about you,

I dialed your number from a payphone,

the stupidity of wishing the news weren’t true,

that your shy self might pick up

at the other end. Your phone didn’t connect;

it must have smashed inside your pocket.

The dial tone kept coming back, divided in three

ascending tones, two for us and the third

for the one that will never be heard again.

Conveyance

I slow my gait

because I carry the dead

inside me, whose names

nobody remembers;

whose queer lives concluded

in empty rooms loud with solitude

and a dwindling aria of grief

and actual bodily pain.

I take a breath, deep and long,

and elaborate my walk

and nourish my contempt for the world

before exhaling it back into the world.

I shut my eyes on the bus

to redraw their faces,

reminded that we could have switched places;

that if I had been the one to die,

they might think of me in passing

and repress a sigh

of guilt or relief

or some feeling in between—who can say?

I press the bell. I get off the bus,

after writing this on my phone, of course;

the luxurious deception of words

with their promise to comfort and heal

and unite us with ghosts.

I carry on, or is it life

that carries on like a bouquet

of balloons released into the air,

a mad smear of colours thinning across the sky?

Pivot

Every path traversed, the way

every place, the quiet collapse

of our multiverse, buildings

shuddering when they

have never stirred before,

shivering to a different standstill,

park benches arching like cats

then settling into benches.

What has faltered

is the belief that nothing

has been altered. In medias res,

that story has begun

to be recanted.

HIDEKO SUEOKA

Prism

You

are shaped

ancient pyramid

with many mysteries
composed of acrylic glass,

turn down rays of the august sun appearing

in patches, extending long diagonals hour by hour;

light allowing somnolence to sway or each eye to be blind

You change the light to a straight rainbow that turns the tint of a door ajar

behind another Dolly’s clone and a sealed petri plate foalchemy in a cramped lab.

JANE JORITZ-NAKAGAWA

From terra form(a) / {{terrain grammar}}

entrance to canyon

blow flat dimension

massive sky flits w/velocity

drained of desire gauzy weed

colonial trigger raw noise awry

environs of entangled

sequence of craft safety

smelting pot of couture

let me be language

in all its stupidity

museum season in leaky aisle

stands in the sitting room

abstract laundry hides

surreal apronry

gap of distilled edges

royal drudge near loose

animal downfall

chiseled weaponry fluted out

vulgar in its peak

of pure display

bone sandwich

garter freeze frame stands on ceremony

intrusive garland distributed

an effect of language

manifold smoothing

raging quench stuck with magic sprinkles

matching brutality perseveres ever

calendar grip sprouts prayer

if ever a far moth dotes

on window dressing dark blank safety magnifying

footsoles of yesterday’s tragedy

here’s hoping

redeemed nest of air

pneumatic community leans sullenly against

ominous inputting device

in the messianic metropolis of seduction

puzzling like private space

languishing in gene pools

forever spurning death tolls likely to rise to the occasion

every crude gesture awaits

lesbian in my head

useless consciousness bailouts

forgive my father who has sinned

in logical testaments to paralysis

a view of rotten flowers

in an imagined landscape

applied to language

sprout wings where defenseless

pouring all day

to the right and left of meaning

toward the peripheral

harbinger of ethics

displaced by language

mist forced into words

by a notched grammar

JEFFREY SIDE

VENUS INDIGNANT

The ejaculatory

life is

the salvation

meteor of

futility or

fidelity willingly

false more

by your

leave during

times of

cultural tautologies

other destinations

ready love

in the

breach always

ambivalent mystery

reality waiting

to be

defiled in

the uninterrupted

present wings

will be

effortless for

aliens needy

of platonic

mist or

evolutionary doubts

in music

pirate maiden

JELENA ANDJELOVSKI

CHINES THING

I remember China
I knew
she'll need centuries
to let go
standing in lines
normality of standing in lines.

ROSENHEIM

Rayner and I
we were
on that train

Night ride.
Buying the tickets.
The station, bushes of people.
I'm from Nigeria.
Afghanistan.
Pakistan.
I'm going to France.
Why no one from Israel?
Because, I speak French.
I'm a hairdresser.
My cat stayed in ruins.
Lucky you.
I couldn't bring my dog.
Are you religious?
I don't believe in god.
I'm a paleontologist.
Don't understand.
Are you Muslim?
Don't believe in god.
Who's giving you bread?
Me to myself.
Then, in whom do you believe?
In this Rayner here.
Take 200 Euros.
Buy us a ticket.
There's no ticket for this train.
They don't want to sell it to us.
How evil.
Breaking our legs.
Cutting our wings.
Fuckers.
Good luck.
Handshake.
Smiles.
Joyful children.
Funny people.
Proud granny.
After a whole life
into the new one.
Hard is the beginning.
It's not a love push.
Not a mummy's hand.

Night falls. Rayner in my lap. Looking wild. Never looked so wild.
Street lights cut the dark and we see each other. Who's afraid of
whom.

A boy cries in his sleep.
Rayner and I, we cuddle him.
Daddy hugs him.
It's quiet.
It's hard.
Desire in a guy's eyes.
Grandpa's broken back.
Night is over.
As the silent show.
Police enters.
Do you have a passport?
No.
No.
No.
You are breaking the foreigner's law.
No.
Step out.
Good morning.
Dialogue repeats.
In this late train
now, only
night dregs
white Europeans
black cat
and me.

BIRTHDAY PARTY

BBC radio is broadcasting a birthday celebration for Arvo Pärt.
Applause, applause, applause. He wears a long black jacket and long
white beard. Deeply touched, he is back on stage, yes. Yes. From this
distance, I can't hear his tears. Applause, applause, applause - grand
music of the crowd. Touches me as a cry of a woman in a Buddhist
temple, as the Buddha's smile that same summer day. Cry is a cry, joy
is a cry and sadness turns into joy and life is one thing. When did this
happen. Till now, Arvo died so many times.

NATSUKO HIRATA

Compass

She selects her own future.

Then steps

to an unknown deck

which does not approve her.

She approves.

And finds a plonk bar

at windy port---

She lies on

Midtown ground---

like a stone nation

opening her libretto

into the atmosphere.

TRANE DeVORE

From 152 Temples and Shrines

No. 4

The magnolia opens itself up

into a thousand petals,

— called in some languages

“the pangolin flower” —

if you put panties on a pangolin

and let it roll into a roll

it might have something of

the bloom on it, a kind of

scent of

nightsoil

still, however, it’s winter and

the magnolias are cold rolled

and hard like buckeyes.

Inside each one, a hard nut

of butter most perspicuous

waiting to melt into the sky

with the hot yellow sun.

SUSAN LAURA SULLIVAN

two tickets won to see someone don a monster mask at the folk
museum landed in the mailbox this afternoon

a ladybird black

hoovering mites on

unsprayed chrysanthemums

honey sweet to strangers,

marble-scattered

the woman on the corner

cries okaeri nasai

trudging past, groceries on my back

a baby on the hip,

a sack of potatoes not able to curl

legs around, mould into

the softness of flesh

my mother said

I was a similar

bundle of

protuberance and I

was

met

Mike near the refrigerators,

he’d gone swimming.

thoughts

had strong-armed me five minutes

prior

through the park and

dawdled still as I

almost walked right past

needing to detect

the alignment of pins

to trip the day

into an autumnal roundness only

just brushed by winter’s lips

there was one more,

one more

one more present

to [re]collect.

mt. fuji - shimizu

in the shadow of this mountain my life has been spent the red torii frames me in its pi i rest against the doors of the newest shrine a neighbourhood box backing the empty seiyu department store its bins once provided me with all the food i needed the trains can be heard rattling past the mowing of the cars on the highway now i flip the cat door of the change box of the green phone jigsawed to the corner of the road hoping to find a few coins unsettling the air the panoply of a magician whose doves have flown.

a piece of tarpaulin
wrapped around
a telegraph pole
on this gray day

a blue
tattered shawl

KIYOKO OGAWA

early January

a dog with three legs

goes

2.

yellow sand

toward me who's been

left behind by the world

3.

a white butterfly

on dokudami flowers

my heart in necrosis

BIODATA

Jelena ANDJELOVSKI, dramaturg and poet, is the author of the poetry books Homeland, rage machine and 09:99am. She lives in Serbia and can be reached at jelenandjelovski (at) gmail.com.

Maxine CHERNOFF is the author of fourteen books of poetry and winner of a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry as well as heads the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

Japanese poet Yoko DANNO has written poetry solely in English for decades. She is the author of several chapbooks and books of poetry and translations. Visit http://www.ikutapress.com/danno3.html.

Trane DeVORE grew up in the the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived for most of his adult life before moving to Japan in 2005 to teach at Osaka University. He has published two books of poetry ― series/mnemonic (Avec Books, 1999) and Dust Habit (Avec Books, 2005) ― and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including the most recent issues of The Catamaran Literary Reader and The Island Reader. When he’s not busy keeping up with academic work or listening to records, he likes to write and take photographs.

Anne ELVEY lives in Seaford, Victoria and is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. Her poetry collection Kin (Five Islands Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2015. Her new chapbook This Flesh That You Know, international winner of the Overleaf Chapbook Manuscript award, was published by Leaf Press (Canada) in 2015.

Marcus GRANDON is a multimedia artist, writer, and educator living in Shizuoka City, Japan. Currently , his creative work focuses on both digital paintings and videos of cityscapes. He can be reached at marccusgrandon (at) mac.com.

Natsuko HIRATA is a resident of Tokyo. She is the editor of Quince Wharf and has translated the work of Sandy Macintosh and Thomas Fink. Her poetry has appeared in the Marsh Hawk Review, Otoliths, and BlazeVOX, and she can be reached via email at midsummerchild (at) gmail.com.

Cynthia HOGUE has published eight collections of poetry, including Revenance (Red Hen Press 2014), listed as one of the 2014 standout books by the Academy of American Poets. She is a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and directs the MFA program in English at Arizona State University.

Jane JORITZ-NAKAGAWA's most recent three books are FLUX (BlazeVox, USA, 2013), the chapbook wildblacklake (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press, USA, 2014) and distant landscapes (Theenk Books, USA, 2015). She lives in central Japan. Email is welcome at janejoritznakagawa(at)gmail(dot)com.

Kiyoko OGAWA is a Kyoto-born poet, essayist and academic. She has published five English and three Japanese books of poetry as well as a monograph on T.S.Eliot. Her recent publication is A Single Flower: 100 Bilingual Tanka 2003-2014.

Steven SEIDENBERG is a San Francisco based writer and visual artist. He is the author of Itch (RAW ArT Press, 2014), Null Set (Spooky Actions Books, 2014) and Songs of Surrender (Gummi-Geliebter Verlag, 2013), co-edits pallaksch.pallaksch (Instance Press), an annual anthology of new poetry, and curates poetry events and publications at The Lab in San Francisco. A collection of his photographs is forthcoming in 2016 from Lodima Press.

Jeffrey SIDE is the editor of The Argotist Online and has had poems published in many print and online magazines. He has also reviewed poetry for many print and online magazines. His publications include Carrier of the Seed, Distorted Reflections, Slimvol and Collected Poetry Reviews 2004-2013.

Hideko SUEOKA was born in Japan and lives in Tokyo. Recent work appears in The Forward Book of Poetry 2015, the poetry and prose webzine Ink, Sweat & Tears, and the online journal Stravaig.

Susan Laura SULLIVAN writes poetry, prose, essays and sometimes performs. Her latest work can be found in Rat’s Ass Review, The Font, and the anthology In Their Branches.

Cyril WONG is a Singaporean poet, fictionist and critic whose last poetry collection was The Lover's Inventory (Math Paper Press, 2015).

Mark YOUNG is the editor of the online poetry journal Otoliths, lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for more than fifty-five years. His work has been widely anthologized, & his poetry & essays translated into a number of languages. A new collection of poems, Bandicoot habitat, is now out from Gradient Books in Finland.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH