Truck June 2015: Three Poems by Gwyn McVay

The Grey-Streaked Hare

thumping hard against my fingers
your furry heart beats with my need
you sense it — do you not —

perhaps you are frightened
I hold the beastie to my breast
O, know you are safe —

you and your fast heart — within mine
such body heat — salty and constant


---


All You Have To Do

You can pose but you don't have to pose
You can play your instrument or just sit
by the river with me and listen to that
You can toast me with your fizzing soda
or sip it quietly and just smile
You can tell me a story or just lie
next to me, I'll guard your dreams
You can do cartwheels, you can just be
the musclebound pony I saw striding
smooth as beach rock under a load
of all you possess and all you need own

If I have an orange you have half an orange
If I draw breath you have all my heart


---


The Butterfly Effect

the roughest bastard,
born in a bear's den, will let
a butterfly sit

in the crook of his elbow,
watching its slightest beat


***

Gwyn McVay is the author of two chapbooks of poems and one full-length collection, Ordinary Beans (Pecan Grove Press). She has published poems and reviews in more than sixty periodicals and in three anthologies, most recently Letters to the World (Red Hen Press). She lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, where she teaches writing at Millersville University; three of her poems are in this year's volume of the university's literary magazine, George Street Carnival. 

Truck June 2015: Eight Tanka by Maxianne Berger

summer string

broken sign
amid the garden debris
Forget-M
as if I’d become
some wizened elder

under the sunhat
unruly silver curls 
remarry! I’d 
want some old man
farting in my bed?

---

simply friends
walking through the woods
discover
in this green canopy
filtered light is intimate

binoculars
passed back and forth
observation hut
watching gannets court 
amidst lovers' graffiti

jut of rocks
overlooking the river
we feel it
the thrill of that
very first whale

too hot
to climb a mountain
slippery moss
along the scenic trail
the back of his shoes

---

is this enough?
I watch him stand
in a tidepool
watching a heron
watching for fish

vows exchanged
under a tall spruce
so many years
in the boreal forest
a private altar

***
Maxianne Berger, poet and literary translator, is active in both the French and the English haiku and tanka communities in Montreal and beyond.  Her writing meanders between the minimalism of Japanese forms and the unpremeditated outcomes of OuLiPo-style constraints. She is among those featured in Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets (Souaid & Farkas, eds; Signature, 2013). She has co-edited three anthologies -- one of haiku, in English, and two of tanka, in French, and now co-edits Cirrus: tankas de nos jours. After two books of lyric poetry, her most recent book is a dual-language tanka collection, un renard roux / a red fox (petits nuages, 2014). 

Truck June 2015: Two Poems by Le Hinton

Everything Reminds Me of Jazz

I like little things. The tiny and irrelevant. A diminished

7th at a rock concert.  An earwig mothering

eggs into a world that wishes

them harm. I feel sorry for Pluto (dismissed

from the adults' table) crying in his cranberries,

exercising in his room, struggling to grow.

What use are grace notes of cellophane

tape lost among shards of wrapping paper?

The old man hoarding blue pills, hoping for a reason

to swallow them. The brief prayer on the lips of an atheist.

An empty ring box from another failed

marriage. Thrown rice that were never seeds.

No PR's needed for the small and consequential,

the virus conspiracies, the petite

cancer cells (armed with daggers) waiting

in dark alleys of the body. All of them stars

of this week's show.

Where are the headlines when a heartbeat

goes missing? No pinprick of blue or improvised

rhythm. Only a bass thump, a snare snap.

A small call, an even smaller response. 

Measures and measures with nothing to play. 

***

The Last Nights of Ecstasy

At McDonald's, a young boy asks a blind lady

if she is afraid of the dark. I only believe

in things I can't see, like my white cane or next week.

In the midst of their love affair,

a couple never unbuttons the middle

of the night, never trusts its moist conversation.

The blind lady asks the boy

if furniture moves when no one is looking.

Then asks him the color of his cane.

***

Le Hinton is the author of five poetry collections, including The Language of Moisture and Light (Iris G. Press, 2014). His work has been widely published and can be found in The Best American Poetry 2014, Little Patuxent Review, the Baltimore Review, and outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, incorporated into Derek Parker's sculpture Common Thread.