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


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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


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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


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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. 

Lorraine Martinuik

Beadnell Creek

N   49°32.531'
W 124°45.536'

1

How time can stop. Stand still mid-passage, mid-stream. A bridge, high water, flood  where the creek curves to run north. The creek leaves the forest canopy there, where gray, where no horizon. Where the estuary, wide open. Mouth, urgent for the sea.

Bridge, cross over. Leave or return to, come to. A different time.

2

Sweetgrass smoke fused with winter. Fog closed in, shrouded a figure formed of leave-taking words pronounced for weeks, months following the news. How a death can shape things, as if all life is soft clay.

Water, flood-high swept close under the bridge. Wind, storm-force swept in from the sea, from the north, from outside the forest canopy. Effigy of clay swaddled in cedar fronds. Halted for a time there on the bridge.

3

Released, the effigy rode the creek, but not far. The outflow, even in flood, not strong enough to sweep it all the way to the estuary. Where the tide.

Freighted, the weight of clay took it under water, there where the creek curves north. Settled it, mid-stream, in the soft silt bed, to be worn away, over time, grain by grain. Over time, the creek carried the story to its mouth, where it opens to the sea.

Lorraine Martinuik ©2014

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