Truck May 2015: Text by Rudolfo Carrillo

Year Fifteen of the Permanent Emergency Condition

Sky, broken clouds. Visibility, ten.
A building gently processed with moonlight.
The registry of noise and forgetful silence.
Until your hand is crushed in the mechanism.

A joyful holiday occasion,
he wore his best cuff links and Chinese socks.
Everyone was asleep by midnight.
There were plates of meat everywhere.

An interesting phenomena can be repeated
by withdrawing examples of divinity from
the orifices produced through long-term
geologic processes. Holy word, earth.

Events whose sonic representation in the space-time continuum can be further symbolized as waveforms are constantly crossing my perceptual boundaries. The phone rang once. A dog drank deeply from its stationary water container and my wife asked me to pour her another cup of coffee. Based on previous experience, I expect birds to begin chirping in approximately six point five hours.

Beholden to the rain in a fashion
reminiscent of iron's rusty affiliation,
a group of writers whose base of operations
is located near a sodden pile of newspapers

left for pigeons and the severely homeless
near the Ealing Underground Station
are really just a murder of crows waiting
for flight instructions and cigarettes.

After the crowd launched a number of paper balloons, which I must say were marvelous to watch as they floated past the cathedral and toward the volcano where they would later become a sort of rubbish that might well be a threat to local wildlife, we wandered back to our hotel room where a man with a gun jumped from out the closet and bade us to come with him, as our very lives were in the balance.

***

Produced by Rudolfo Carrillo, using an Apple Mac G4 computer with a Motorola processor. Various organic structures associated with the human body as well as non-quantifiable but possibly mystic mental processes were also used in the production of this unit of text and accompanying image.

Truck May 2015: Two Poems by Alan Britt

POEM THAT CHEATED ITSELF

Rubber band snaps person of interest to attention.

Sturdy conflagration the way we like it. Athena

wades the hyacinths of my thoughts—severe &

naked as a sunbeam tattooing the waxy leaves

of imagination. Athena buys the neighborhood,

rec center & all.

Asbestos fibers dye the vinyl rope supporting

this reptile weapon known as the final meal—

last buffet, gravy spooned by god himself, stringy

beard & cargo shorts just to influence the weather.

Larvae the size of helmets that pried Occupy

off the lines of decency.

Overwhelming odor of outhouses haunts the

republic but its festival of chrome shopping carts

reversing on cue before their veterans of foreign

wars~~~~~how many wars on US terra firma,

occasional Russian sub but not much else.

Face shattered into war paint, ochre & thick lemon

slicing hope from the herd, plus restless vermilion

like lovers addicted to being addicted.

Blinding cotton comes with a price.

Torches tracing creosote fingers across limestone caves

left no doubt that skyscrapers would follow—antelope

groomed in drawing class, mammoth assuming its

rightful place in anthropological lectures, saber tooth

deities crushed by skyscrapers—we could've been

contenders, we could've been everything we could've

been.

Toads in pearl trench coats spin

Grand Central gates’ stainless blades

inside the VitaMix 5000, refurbished

but trailing Secretariat by a mere

length & a quarter—not bad

considering how Big Red

embarrassed the competition.

Like a Vegas coin pumped into just about everything

we own or thought we owned, pelican wings arrive

like trumpets on stumps bleached white by digested

sardines & migrating hummers. Lunch crowd tosses

bones from red plastic robots spitting digits like

there's always tomorrow.

Pelican knows best, so I trust his instincts like they

were the Roberts sisters saving me from a potbellied

furnace broiling one December Indiana A-Frame,

folding chairs lining two azalea-covered walls.

I could've been scalded during infancy by a fascination

with Impressionist blue, plus astral energy spitting the illusion

of heaven embossed in heat, without ice & without consequences.

Spanish beet checkered into burro blanket

waltzes me through the center of town,

past homeless saints & desperate Romas

exchanging blue collar nightmares for dreams

not worth dreaming.

No urgency.

Get animal control to eradicate those bastards

lost inside the vagina of the 10th Commandment

who believe the sun rises over them! 

Some urgency.

EVOLUTION

The leisure class that enabled Mallarmé, Breton, Bonnefoy,

in pretty much said order but ushered in or gushered

through clogged arteries feeding the brain's garden———

imagination. The leisure class got away with plenty before

they faded, well, at least some leisures bruised & battered

took Blake seriously, shivered before Goya & gasped at

Francis Bacon's savagery! Some even fell overboard, bodies

missing to this day but otherwise MIA. A bone here, a bone

there but not much else.      

.     

            .      

                        .

                                    .

                                                .

                                                            .

                                                                       .Now a new

breed of leisures roams the halls: ones with gills, amphibians

traveling backwards through the slime, primordial religions

guzzling guilt, fanning the fire, yet surviving on faith much

like our ancient ancestors but this time evolving with a

peculiar twist in DNA thus allowing for a new species of

genocides to survive the blinking barbed tips of neon fishing

hooks trolling the midnight waters for bigger game—a prize

just about the size of you & me.

***

Alan Britt served as judge for the 2013 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. He read poetry and presented the “Modern Trends in U.S. Poetry” at the VII International Writers’ Festival in Val-David, Canada, May 2013. He read poetry for the 6x3 Exhibition at the Jadite Gallery in Hell’s Kitchen/Manhattan in December 2014. Also, sponsored by LaRuche Arts Contemporary Consortium (LRACC) he read poetry at the Union City Museum of Art/William V. Musto Cultural Center in Union City, NJ in May, 2014. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. A new interview for Lake City Lights is available at 

http://lakecitypoets.com/AlanBritt.html. His latest books include Lost Among the Hours: 2015, Parabola  Dreams (with Silvia Scheibli): 2013 and Alone with the Terrible Universe: 2011. He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

Truck: May 2015: A Poem by Ardith L. Brown

The Transparency of Cats

In 1967 the quarter was new, shiny

and bright in the hands of small children

buying cokes and comics and grape pixie sticks.

I was two, a year before the assassinations and done

in the summer of love.  Now I sit in the kitchen turning

the coin, now smoothed, now millimeters thinner.  

This house was built in 1962 its Pepto-Bismol

paint and avocado linoleum layered beneath

our newly tiled floor and fresh crown molding.

Outside hail bullets the roof, and because pine trees

in Georgia grow so alarmingly tall, like match-

sticks, brittle and ready to snap or upend

in a storm, I stand and pause as I hear limbs falling.  

Wet, determined thumps, as though magnets pulled them

down, bodies on the dangerous and damaged ground

stilled by soft grass and fire ants.

Soon the team arrived: a simian swarm, piling

out of vans and pickups with chainsaws, blades, ropes,

pulleys-- forces capable of felling the eighteen pines

in our neighbor’s yard, some living, some dead,

New green needles pricking the September breeze;

the old branches, too, naked and gnarled with arthritis

fingers, hands twisted in atrophy and decay, fighting

from above the impulse to let go, still clutching

the sky. But then the cutters ascended, razing trunks

and members in single eight foot sections. Oh, sweet

destruction, alacrity of sparrows, violence of war.

Meanwhile feral kittens played among the machinery:

calico and marmalade, tabby and tuxedo, they ran

between backhoes and stump grinders, waiting

patiently as the world crashed down upon them,

seeking safety in their den under the crawl space.

They lingered in that womb music with spiders

and roaches, letting loose a sound like weeping mothers do.

I shut the door and closed the noise out with the glass.

I thought about the child we wouldn't have, the pines

forever lost, and in the painful

absence of trees, all I could do

was listen to the mournful lot.

***

Ardith L. Brown currently resides in Flannery O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, GA, but she doesn't forget New Mexico.  When she is not wrangling family or grading papers, she writes poems.  She has a B.A. in Poetry from UNM, an M.A. in Literature from the University of Houston, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Georgia College & State University. She misses green chile, mountains, and liberals.

Rudolfo Carrillo - Conditions Arising From the Failure of Postmodernism

Rudolfo Carrillo - There is a Fragile Horse

Rudolfo Carrillo

Generation of Text Structures as Lunar Output

Rudolfo Carrillo - Sonnet 31

I shave my face every third

Day. I did not sleep last night

But instead dreamt of an

Army. Swallows build nests

From mud, in the eaves.

They have eliminated the need

For chemical pest control.

There is a big lizard behind

Organized firewood; careful

She may flatten herself against

Your coming. Frozen in a

Crevice until every other eye

Begins to trace what stars

Remain after the rain fell.