Joel Weishaus

Your Name, This Net
for Alan Sondheim

Traced against the empty, traced through the header, it's a waste of the essence, of the body of canons.

Everywhere is artificial,
a waste of depth,
nothing works in depth.

Wrap, don't desire (Spinoza). Quantum tunnels are ghosts crossing over to the Other.

Outside my window, nothing is named.
I look through and know there
were lovers in those ashes,

traced in memories that hold the door open.

I cry over the threshold, "It’s all empty!"

Dark angels fly past wrapped in bodies of glass.

Look for your name in the depth,
in the darkness, in the rapture
of nothingness.

-Joel Weishaus

V Manuscript

Jon Woodson

The Battle of the Archers

you don’t even stand up in your day,

you shift your stance, winding from

foot to foot, making yourself low

and slight, trying to slip around what

they loose at you, the spare darts they

will allow, their recompense. some

pull takes away the weakness of the eye.

they are dancing in the line of the ridge

with the orb of the sun at their backs.

they are taunting with their songs and

twanging with their taut bowstrings.

we know them, they are our cousins

or something more distant. more distant

now. they have teeth on their darts—

white and sharp. not really teeth—

more like voices with dangerous words,

pretty things that put you in pain

if you listen. there is no magic, only

that string of gut that takes on the strength

of the bow. they will not stand there long.

they are thirsty. they are tired. they want.

they want to drive at us and to know our flocks.

you don’t stand up in your day. you crouch

and you bend so that you appear

to be dancing if anyone is fooled

by appearances, but you are making

yourself into a bird or a sidewinder,

anything but a friend or a brother.

nothing is more kindly than a dead man,

he gives you everything that he has.

he smiles as he lies down to surrender

his flocks, his stream of water,

his weapons, his magic up under the cliff.

you don’t even stand up in your day

unless you want to lie down

in that shadow and never stop giving things away.

John Rawls at Hiroshima

Hiroshima by moonlight was clinical and lunar

and secure enough, if not civilized.

Subsequent heavy rainfall, then persistent showers,

had washed away some of the residual radioactivity.

Records indicate that troops occasionally

patrolled the destroyed area of the city.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some lengthier form of campaign.

Arriving autonomously by jeep, the ignorant vehicle

driven by autonomous driver, universal

implications were at rare intervals lopsided in the landscape;

little was rational or reasonable.

The approximate perimeters of total destruction from blast and fire,

like everything showing, demanded an equal indifference.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other regime of fairness and flame.

There were contours of long-term danger and shame

that suggested we keep this field of imperfection

to sit in while making our pitiless picks in the future.

Death makes us uncomfortable, desolation

makes us want to rebuild, to veil

what abstraction reveals in the muster of frays.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other plan of disintegration.

The mistake is plain. The bare-persons are gone,

and they ought to be here,

but not in the way that they are shadowed now.

The jeep idles, the intractable night is full of potential.

He will drive off and defend the good,

placing life between the pillars of slavery and the atom.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other average utilitarianism.

[Harvard University professor John Rawls, a leading figure in moral and political philosophy, was the author of The Theory of Justice.]

Aviation in August

Over the bay the C 130 banked like an osprey
coming down for a strike
at the surface. The tide was ambiguous, and I thought
of some Frost—neither out far nor in deep: research
supports the idea that most thinking 
is a recombination of previous thoughts. No troops
birthed from the slow body, no spiders on wind-threads,
no dandelion fluff. Just flight practice. Around. Around.The perfectionist OCD of war. No waves today, 
and pebbles underfoot. Then an apache gunship lines along 
obsessively, and from my companion
I get a monologue on the logic of wanting
to be a door gunner. To be able to have the danger
in your wallet like a credit card with 
some fantastic limit—if you don’t get
shot out of the sky. It’s a dead language going across
the sky and meaning nothing here “at home,”
the only grammar apparent, a young girl stuffing 
an overdetermind breast into the flimsy chute.

Why I Am Not on the Money

I have heard that Oprah Winfrey

is on the kwacha in Malawi

I have heard that Madonna

is on the pula in Botswana

I have heard that Kanye West

is on the dirham in the Emirates

I have heard that Paul Anka

is on the rupee in Sri Lanka

I have heard that Cher

is on the franc in Niger

I have heard that George Clooney

is on the franc in Djibouti

I have heard that Justin Bieber

is on the franc in French Polynesia

I have heard that Beyonce

is on the krone in Norway

I have heard that Barak Obama

is on the florin in Suriname

I have heard that Mick Jagger

is on the franc in Madagascar

I have heard that Scarlet Johansen

is on the manx in the isle of Man

I have heard that Tiger Woods

is on the dollar in the Solomon Islands

I have heard that Steven Spielberg

is on the som in Kyrgzstan

I have heard that John Bon Jovi

is on the lira in the Holy See

I have heard that Lady Gaga

is on the pa’anga in Tonga

I have heard that Leonardo DiCaprio

is on the loti in Lesotho

I have heard that Angelina Jolie

is on the lira in Italy

Why I Am Not an Ice Dancer

The things that I reject are the things that define me.

I know the popular wisdom says

that we should be shaped by what we embrace,

but they just say that to get the word embrace

into the room. I am not going to go around

embracing anything. In fact, if I go around

it will be because the world is undetectably circulating

and I am fixed up so that I go around

even though I am lying in my bed perfectly still

trying to wait until the vertigo passes.

The part that disturbs me is the habit

the ice dancers have of going in reverse

before they do something colossal. Who wants

to back up to the crisis, or play turn about

with the moment of truth? Like the sky divers,

I want to go at things head first, joining

hands with the other Icaruses and then lighting

those flares, so that we make trails kiting

the whole way down. All the ice dancers make

are ugly scratches on the ice, by the way.

So, there’s another heartfelt demerit set

in my black book of estimations. Now ballet

fakes weightlessness with feathery clothes

and fragile women on their toes, but truly

falling weightlessly to the ground

is pure and simple and realistic. Which reminds

me of the sentimentality of water ballet—

half in, half out, need I say more? Buy hey,

I know it’s hard. I know it sounds like sour grapes.

Ice dancing. It’s just that it’s philosophically inadequate.

Why I Am Not a Woman

I am not a woman because

I am a massive brooding humpback

of testosterone ice hurtling

out of intergalactic insolence

zooming toward collision

with the Earth on a trail of vodka

and optimism at twenty

or thirty times the speed

of child support.

All the way down the path

of my descent,

I knew my destiny.

All the way along the curve

of my trajectory

I had a sense of my

ultimate purpose.

But then I was confronted

and I had to stand up

before the thermal

intake window of forasmuch.

When I couldn’t make up

my mind, I slapped a stack

of credit cards down on the counter

and requested all three

moral bypass operations.

Why I Am Quiet and Keep to Myself

Nikola Tesla was quiet and kept to himself
Walt Whitman was quiet and kept to himself
John Lennon was quiet and kept to himself
Ralph Waldo Emerson was quiet and kept to himself
Thomas Edison was quiet and kept to himself
Karl Marx was quiet and kept to himself
Mikhail Kalashnikov was quiet and kept to himself
J. Robert Oppenheimer was quiet and kept to himself
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was quiet and kept to himself
Charles Baudelaire was quiet and kept to himself
Vincent Willem van Gogh was quiet and kept to himself
Alexander Fleming was quiet and kept to himself
Ray Bradbury was quiet and kept to himself
James Baldwin was quiet and kept to himself
Ramana Maharshi was quiet and kept to himself
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was quiet and kept to himself
Wernher von Braun was quiet and kept to himself
Walt Disney was quiet and kept to himself
Samuel Clemens was quiet and kept to himself
Daniel Boone was quiet and kept to himself
Roger Williams was quiet and kept to himself
Joshua Slocum was quiet and kept to himself
David Livingstone was quiet and kept to himself

James Morris


Code #1

Code, no longer my abode,
Says who but a toad,
I offload at the end of the road,
Loam,
Knowledge is but foam,
Well, I'm free to roam
But instead go home,
And stare at mono spaced fonts on an LCD.


Code #2

http://jwm-art.net/art/text/code_no2.cc

Classy_people

http://jwm-art.net/art/text/classy_people.cc

Vernon Frazer

Click on image to view!

Daniel Tiffany (In Mie Mie's Kitchen)

Lanny Quarles

Daniel Tiffany (In Mie Mie's Kitchen)

many shall run to and fro within a jeweled and silver taco


across the high and empty
hospital food court atrium
sat a lone and portly hispano-femme
holding a cellphone up to her cranium
which was shrouded carelessly in long blonde hair
and though she was much distant
there were plainly twin fleshy bags
beneath her dark quiet eyes
yerba mate' teabags so

in a sense the atrium was to blame
for what happened next
as i ate my two egg and bacon tacos
waiting for my wife's uterine polyp
to be surgically removed

i stared at her across the room
in a manner no less slack-jawed than she
but began to see that she was
a mayan morgan fairchild
with her bare brown foot
up on the table

exuding primitive nobility
the nude foot took on a roguish provocation
and seemed to me like a daring explication
of chinese foot-binding a totally mole' UFO

but after i had finished my taco
i began to realize that the foot
was not a foot at all
but a crumpled paper bag
sitting alone on the table's surface

it was then that the old shaman
entered the food court atrium
as a deep green jaguar so nearly black
and i thought as i walked back
to the surgical waiting room

about william wordsworth's enormous
indolent hands like oaken rudders
being caressed by the tiny vicious
skilled and gentle hands
of my unconscious wife's
beautiful young asian gynecologist

and i thought of her small dry hands
as mayan anacreontiques
and the medical city as the castle of otranto
filled with innumerably metered heartbeats

John Bennett

the vomited toast

. swelling . sneeze . clod or .

comb . ice fold . eh eh eh .

my twister . in your dogged

folder . boom where ,lawn

... the twice coughed ,your

. bigger face . what’s che

wed . ?

...bolus ,nap...

the boot

my mirrored head ash my

...not here ...the crazy

lake laugh ))jars pulsing

in the silt((( yr conten

ido fatídico it’s the nor

te ,b lanco ,in revisible

vertido oditrev ni ,ángulo

,s troked a cross the mu

ddy sink re flexion my

eye n burnt

the is

spelled the hung er my

leg swoll )L( the dou

ble ph one the d ouble

p hone I ccalledd my

ththigh its clotted ha m

y l ung ex planation s

poke back into my m

mouthth where the ash

congealed where the )sal

ted shoe( ‘s’s

}negck{

the wave

...yr foggy leg” wha

t astes the slot’s m

ist loss’ suit lunch d

rib b l e what the

sweaty fork re f lected w

as the F enhancement ,dou

ghy clouds dragging down

the window ┌─┐dead ,,,f,,,

,l,i,e,s,,, on sill┌─┐ ))yr fiss

ured negck((( the corn

born the laundered shoe’s

chewed bread ]balOney

sandwich frOm the dumpster[

so the sky Forgetting ,wob

bles in yr exhalation

wind ,or closing the eyes

the tide

ay fondled the lunch sack

lint raised my sticky fin

gers to the wind curled o

ver the dumpster ver la

pelusa ocular los pedazos

de pared pintada con

plumas incontinentes el

agua que cae en la bolsa

de papel ,grasienta ,lam

ida ,twisted to the sh

ape of a turd {

la jaqueca

plac ard iente who

lly wallets where the d

oor oncet was ah

long hopping neck ah e

ndoemetic force attr

action HEEL heel

into the sopppy rrug the

spider drowned an pin

ched the ear ,list

ened to the paper’s

char the wet black

crumbpling on yr labp

...tel qu’un charnel polypier.

- Arthur Rimbaud

Truck's new editor for April

Many thanks go to Colin Morton and MaryLee Bragg for spinning us through windy March. And here comes Alan Sondheim, who'll be our editor/driver during April.

Truck's editors, past, present and future as of April 1, 2014

Present

Alan Sondheim

Future


Apr. 2014 -- Alan Sondheim
May 2014 -- Glenn Bach
June 2014 -- Bill Pearlman
July 2014 -- Edgar Gabriel Silex
Aug. 2014 -- Jerry McGuire
Sept. 2014 -- Karri Kokko
Oct. 2014 -- Márton Koppány
Nov. 2014 -- Burt Kimmelman
Dec. 2014 -- Chris Lott

Past

Apr. 2011 -- Kate Schapira
May 2011 -- Wendy Battin
June 2011 -- Frank Parker
July 2011 --  Skip Fox
Aug. 2011 -- Ken Wolman
Sept. 2011 -- Michael Tod Edgerton
Oct. 2011 -- Kelly Cherry
Nov. 2011 -- Andrew Burke
Dec. 2011 -- Lewis LaCook

Jan. 2012 --  Larissa Shmailo
Feb. 2012 -- Gerald Schwartz
Mar. 2012 -- Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Apr. 2012 -- Lynda Schor
May 2012 -- David Graham
June 2012 -- Lars Palm
July 2012 --  Elizabeth Switaj
Aug. 2012 --  rob mclennan
Sept. 2012 -- Georgios Tsangaris
Oct. 2012 -- Douglas Barbour
Nov. 2012 -- Dirk Vekemans 
Dec. 2012 -- Erik Rzepka

Jan. 2013 -- Alan Britt
Feb. 2013 -- Mark Weiss
Mar. 2013-- Mary Kasimor
Apr. 2013-- John M. Bennett

May 2013--Orchid Tierney
June 2013--Victoria Marinelli
July 2013 -- Volodymyr Bilyk
Aug. 2013 -- David Howard

Sept. 2013 -- Philip Meersman
Oct. 2013 -- Chris Lott
Nov. 2013 -- Alexander Cigale
Dec. 2013 -- Catherine Daly

Jan. 2014 -- Maria Damon
Feb. 2014 -- John Oughton
Mar. 2014 -- Colin Morton and MaryLee Bragg