Wendy Battin takes the wheel

Happy May Day. I've never driven a truck before, so be prepared for swerves.

I'm at odds with my Muse, so have finally met it. I've never thought much of the concept before. Apart from the gender nonsense comitted in its name, Muse has always been projection. Sometimes it's seemed just shorthand for the beloved, or for the ideal reader. I have both, but they fill their own spaces completely and don't speak through me. I might write to them, but not from them. It's only now, many decades into the work, that the Muse makes itself known as something other, by derailing my intentions again and again. I can't call it him or her, I can't put name or face to it. It's that "chune in the head," as Pound had it via Yeats:

"what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick out and worry him."

(E.P.'s review of _Prufrock_ in Poetry, 1917)

It lets me know at every turn that the book I thought I'd written is not the book. It undoes every careful thought with song. It had its way with me so thoroughly that I never thought of it in my first books. It was there or not. But now I'm ready to muse on it, will be speaking of other poets' muses and my own, and invite you to muse along for my May on Truck. Say where you sing from.

And many thanks to you, Kate, for a splendid month. It's been fun seeing what you've been doing. And reading all those new poems and poets.

The month of May will bring Wendy Battin to the wheel for another month on the road.

Stay tuned.

Hal

Truck Farewell

Today’s my last day as your guest editor. Thanks to Halvard Johnson for the opportunity!

Thank you, poets who contributed, for responding graciously and with FANTASTIC work to an email that meant (among other things) that I hadn’t heard of you before. I hope you’ve gained some new readers as a result! And thanks for writing at all—I hope this will encourage you to keep doing so.

Thanks also to everyone who’s been dropping in to read and, I hope, returning. Stick around for poets with totally different plans.

I’m so glad I did this—learned a ton, became acquainted with some fine and delightful poets, read illuminating and staggering work, and got to share it with others. Thanks again to all who helped it happen.

Kate

Jai Arun Ravine

MARIO MAURER & B.O.Y.

I-look-at-my-phone-in-order-not-to-make-eye-contact-with-the-cute-B.O.Y.-floating-in-my-Thai-bubble-milk-tea.avi

I rip apart boba with my teeth. I suck up Mario Maurer in a Pepsi poster. He holds up a skateboard on the cover of Crush and ollies across the screen.

The LCD / is a window / in a Quickly / Sightseeing Bus / Karaoke Music Video

B.O.Y.-scrolls-by-in-tight-black-touch-screen-phones-clutching-black-encased-legs-dancing-on-a-fountain-selling-oranges-in-an-Italian-marketplace-courtyard-alley.avi

I substitute his object of desire. I divert his gaze to another boy in B.O.Y.

I touch / what I want and watch / it animate on the sidewalk / in the video of the sidewalk / cueing up to my mouth

I-go-see-the-movie-'Eclipse'-with-Mario-Maurer-We-get-bubble-tea-and-someone-takes-pictures-of-us-at-the-mall-and-posts-them-on-flickr.avi

B.O.Y. cables my ear to a shuffle wanting 25 seconds to download. I put him on and stand in front of the green screen and wait for my cells to fill with pixels.

I recall your awkward / gay dance moves / like someone else's english subtitles / waiting to participate

I-follow-along-I-reach-my-arms-inside-the-english-words-you-say-on-the-bridge-'girl-you-know-those-things-I-did-for-you-it's-because-I-want-you-to-know-how-much-I-feel-about-you-right-now'.avi

When I sing along my hand scrolls just above your stomach, hovering over each syllable. I wait at the end of the sentence for the color to turn, for you to ask the question I've already begun to erase.

I move to the back / of the bus slip / into the backdrop reach through / every word ending in 'ai'

I-post-a-video-of-myself-on-your-facebook-page-inside-the-iphone-you-left-on-the-Quickly-Sightseeing-Bus.avi

I stream the 3 min 23 sec of my song and then the REPLY button hovers over my chest.

I wait inside / your iphone on the bus / crossing the bridge waiting / to be touched

MORE WORK BY JAI ARUN RAVINE:

Corollary Press

Drunken Boat

Galatea Resurrects

Yvette Thomas

I DO NOT WAGER MY LIFE UPON IT

for Abbie

Blindly, in the spring grove, another hand in mine

like my own–

Small, nails.

It's the walking boulevard, flowered trees snow their petals on the stone path

to nowhere, to where the land is bit

at the beginning of water.

Shade or it's night–the thought of rain and that same friend

missing, her shape in heaven, cast.

She says,

Cloud-brand, air-daughter, I would not wager my life upon it

or that sense we trace the sky with, disappear.

MORE WORK BY YVETTE THOMAS

Revolving Door

The Daily Palette

Delirious Hem

Yvette's blog

elimae

Jaswinder Bolina

MUNICIPAL SCENE

The telephone poles lashed and strobed by an electrical storm

in the bus window, we must’ve been halfway through Uptown

when you clutched at my poncho and said, Bill,

are you seeing how this deluge of photons overwhelms

the tiny cockpit of the eyeball! In this hullabaloo of thunder!

In the damp overthrow of April! You said, And think

how the plains crumple into a pageant of hills

at the feet of our mountains and of our noble woods

with their shotgun shoulders and the labyrinthine city in which

our punk-haired rosebushes are a berserk argument between

the trees and hydrants! You said, Isn’t it all such a wingding!

But I said, In our chintzy country? I said. Here we’re insipid,

eager only for diversions and chic habiliments. I said, We’re daft

and out-of-proportion, vain and cussing each other in traffic

as if the ego is something more substantial than a pesky infection

of the corpus, as if the corpus isn’t only downing its espresso

and everything bagel with cream cheese en route to the office

park of nonexistence. It’s commuting, at least, out of the palace

of our best efforts! you said. You said, At least look how bonny

I am in this skirt the color of a hatchet wound blooming!

You said, Look how the telephone lines droop and festoon

all our avenues, how the rain paratroops totally reckless

out of the cloud! See how it has no religion? How nothing

deters it? But I said, We’re more like the gutter spouts

or drainage grates or the steam rising from asphalt

like end credits after the squall. So, you said, Here’s a rope,

you dolt. Go climb a tree. I knew then I’d deflated you brutishly.

I said, O, please, forgive me! I said, Here’s a bouquet

made of moths ruddied by stoplights, o please forgive me!

Here’s the jamboree of a crosswalk, if you’ll only forgive me!

I said, Here’s the sound like ovation the rain makes on rooftops,

won’t you forgive me? But you didn’t forgive me, cratered

as you were in a rut of futility, so I felt futile too, the steel cranes

unmoving over their worksites, under a serious voltage.

I said, Ain’t this a shame? You said, Ain’t that the way?

And we felt more grown up then than we’d felt before,

more sober and American than we’d ever been before, motoring

along the steep crag of the curbside, a fracture of rivulets

garbling the windows, and I said, Honestly, Amelia,

what is it all these chipper tourists come photographing?

MORE WORK BY JASWINDER BOLINA:

Rabbit Light Movies

Verse Daily

AGNI

Missouri Review

751

Rob MacDonald

SHAME

Privacy is exquisite

because none of us

wish our flaws public.

Our phantom limbs

stay hidden until

we get home and

bathe them, alone,

in locked bathrooms.

You can’t bear to see

yourself upside-down

in a soup spoon

in an uptown café.

Halloween is sacred

because none of us

wish our privacy

confined to dreams.

Is your hunger

for the candy bars

under your bed

forbidden or forgiven?

MORE WORK BY ROB MACDONALD

Anti-

Everyday Genius

Vinyl Poetry

H_NGM_N

751

Diode

Yael Villafranca

JOSEFINA

By myself I feed an array of burned down candles.

Mama dreamed I would grow tall onstage,

bleed one raw blue sound into the world’s face.

Carve the lyrics on the crossbeams.

A bracelet from the clear case. A satin scarf

blooming out from my face like a gill so I could

float like an tropical actress. Prices broken into

22 hours, 33 hours.

He plays me music to think to. From when he

was younger and stopped burning walls.

I leaf through so many songs left in the air every day:

For a morning smoke before the rail comes

For glasses hurled to the floor at a party

For how I took his hand in the car

For days I don’t speak to anyone.

The flustered craving is for a sureness.

I wish to appear strange and treasured,

depending on the light, key, and shadow.

We all would die for crystal effortless melody.

When I croon I’m a firstclass loser, you’ll think,

she doesn’t know how to hang on

to anything. Not anger. Not such small feelings.

And I want you to look at me and know.

Listen close. Recognize.

MORE WORK BY YAEL VILLAFRANCA

Yael's blog
Delirious Hem

Two poems translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Toshiko Hirata

DISTANT SKY

In those days, there were still staircases

Climb them and you would reach high places

There were potted plants at the top of the stairs

And inside the pots, dark, dry earth

There were still fountains in the plazas

Sitting around that, people with nothing to do

In those days, there was an untrained but skilled doctor

Who gave us effective shots in the arm

Afterwards, we would always get fevers

But when they went down, the sickness went away too

There were still keyholes in the doors

Where the keys would work without sleep

In those days, I was alive

And that person was not dead

Touch him, and his lips were cold

And his gaze was even colder

There was a fence around the town

And beyond that, an unknown sky

It was easy to cross the fence

But impossible to go more than ten steps

MORE WORK IN ENGLISH BY TOSHIKO HIRATA

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

Translated by Hiroaki Sato

*

Atsusuke Tanaka

MALBORO

He had a tattoo.

Under his leather jacket, a solid, white T-shirt.

Don’t look at me.

I thought I didn’t live up.

There are lots of other young ones.

I am nothing to look at.

But he chose me.

Want to grab a cup of coffee?

He didn’t put in any cream?

So, you’re the same age as me.

He smoked a cigarette.

Only a single week of no smoking.

The name of the love hotel was

Under the Guava Tree.

Rain had soaked his socks.

Should’ve bought some new shoes sooner.

I took a shower with him.

His dick was white and beautiful.

Why am I writing this down in a poem?

Once and that’ll be all.

Just once and that’s okay, someone once said.

I didn’t go home right away.

That was true for both of us.

We both lingered on and on.

I was in Tokyo for seven years.

Our dicks had fallen.

They had fallen a long way.

It’s good if there are natural enemies for people.

There was nothing in Tokyo.

He looked as if there was nothing

And so he was here.

He was beautiful.

His back turned, he placed

On the table his can of cola

Half consumed.

Atsusuke Tanaka's page

Jeffrey Angles's page

Cynie Cory

SOUL-SONG

Here is the pilgrimage, hand over stone,

flat like an iron tongue. I wear this grief

through me -- an angel on fire – a thief

in my garden short-circuiting the zone,

brained-out like a future idiot phone

message heaved from the throat like a belief-

system wrecked, nocked arrow the chief relief.

Sleep cracks gravity’s law, singes the bone

that won’t break the black above live oak limbs.

The backbone rattles the night sun and surfs

metallic satellite light-white that rims

these astral edges, burns blue this song words

cannot undo; no plug, drenched in light-speed,

I’m sawed in half without the past, my reed.

MORE WORK BY CYNIE CORY

Verse Daily
More Verse Daily
Jacket
La Petite Zine
La Fovea