Sunday, March 31, 2013

Terry Folz

Money does not make
amends.
Bedstead made for trend, unsent.
Cap and kettle.
Broom and yardstick.
A paisley color tie.
And mudstained flannel.
Redhead viral magazine page.
Everything squint-eyed.
Like the red and white check
tiles
at the Five Guys Burgers And Fries.
Design arrest.
Pregame foraged implant.
Bent coffeebooks
lean intrepid.
Crooked gray intransigent.
Milk is gonna go through the roof.
Latent.
Blatant.
Late.
And unsaid.
Chainropes make a splatter-drip canvas.
Snot.
And bloated cancer sacs.
Weekend electric.
Fire sauce.
And the mouth inside
peeled raw.
Dancebeat monotone.
And candy colored streetlight.
Ache-dry molar cold and
bloodless.
I think between the pages.
And walk frozen amid blood infused
days
of sleep.
The tamed and sullen songs of dirigibles
roiled, unthreaded.
Cave-chipped fire brick.
Rushing yards.
Silverspattered ash and a bowl of peanut shells,
half-consequential.
I hack and spit
and read unleavened yesterday's nowhere
newspaper.





Terrence Folz works as a standardized test scorer and has been performing poetry and spoken word in various Twin Cities forums for decades.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Mary Kasimor


blueberry jungle
 
through blinds uninvolved SEX WHITE
sheets Buddha WAITS. birdlike knitting
needles TWO drawers of socks undocumented
ROMANCE. violin Lilacs white FIRE a disabled zone
montana’s ELASTIC FATE blood running out. a
glutinous ass private speech food TAX white BREAD
parts CULTURE free blueberry jungle occuping
theater Free for ALL. grazing BUTTER flies tennis
fears UP Balls beach STAR stale loons parts
of PARTS mouse pieces agonizing thoughts feels
fate. PAT baggage. Casino HELL hallucinations old folks
educating Aristotle AVE. truck KING discovers
midwest SPIES. facebook Speed bumping DUCTS.
                                precocious river crows tough STONES
disposable IQ delicious CONTRAST poet central
potable MILK weed remote gloom locked. DIGS
absence spacious WIRED furniture blank face
fancy MONKEYs exchange easy car collecting
BABIES welfare. DITCH fusion furniture ex-ray talk
tough fate captures THEATER face.
 
 
 
 
 
Mary Kasimor is the March guest editor of Truck.


 

Friday, March 29, 2013

Being Simply Stupid by Jefferson Hansen

               “There is no such thing as language”
                                    — Mark Wallace


Feints & shivers against
a look in your eyes
that says something nasty
or not about a
game we may or may not
be playing.

Saying, “You’re sweating
against the cold &
this place is fun” meaning
whatever the hell she
didn’t know she
meant, I guess.

Thinking about language
is a diversion from
the action between your teeth.

A tongue clacks its way against red skin and white
Lips pop against every last glistening track of attempt
Our ears can go nowhere but haywire
Sound refracts and clatters through the thickness of air

And you can only write
when sleep dogs
your periphery &
you wish against
the spring-loaded
clicks of the keyboard:

someone is watching
you someone is always
watching
you

I talk the game of my deepest forgettings hidden
somewhere in grottoes never marked beneath
mountains long lost inside ribs that
hurt to heave & still do it

I
I want to tell you something
that trips at my
latest last glistening &
I see you outside
something invisible & thorned
I can only speak the echoes
from my lost caverns—
can they clatter
and curve into what
you I think need to hear

Sound travels better in water
molecules packed so closely
banging into your chest
your eardrums

We end where we begin
in water
puckering and putrid
wailing against the drip incessant
whimpering at the erosion of
skin and scale

life gathers and sickens
but somehow, somewhere
you knew to pass the berries
for my sponge cake & 


we smile as unknowing &
dumb as the toxins we carry

nothing else matters but your
lips, your lipstick, your shy
white teeth &, for now,
I hold out for being simply stupid 

 

Jefferson Hansen is the author of the novel …and beefheart saved craig (BlazeVox) and Jazz Forms (Bluer Lion), a selected poems. He is the editor of the Internet arts journal AlteredScale.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Colin Herd

rope

a close-up of the cliff edge.
michael’s gone for ice cool
plum. there’s a sparse little
tuft of grass, and a faint
sliver of lichen.
a hand tentatively grasps
its way into the shot, with
dirty finger nails. orangey
dirt. it helps to lever his
head into view, with matching
helmet and grey-black straps.
he sighs deeply, like gargling.
you see two other people quite
a bit further down, looking up.
one in blue and one in red, letting
out more rope from a pulley.
as the rope goes through the
clip, its whinney out-castratos
the wind.
the top guy clips a carabiner
onto a nut and starts pulling up
the rope. he looks round at the
two below and gives them a
thumbs up. they start to relax.





Colin Herd was born in 1985. His first book 'too okay' was published in 2011, and a chapbook came out the same hear called 'like' (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). Poems, reviews and articles have been published in a wide range of digital and print publications including Jacket2, Shampoo, HTMLGIANT, 3:AM Magazine, Chroma, Aesthetica and Mirage #4/Period(ical).



Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Jesse Glass

Propositions & Commentary


A. Propositions:

I walk to the other day and I wait

For the Archons to answer. You send me a card

With four seed packets stapled to it. It


Is the hour of u,n,d,e,r,s,t,o,o,d. Still we

Do notice the changes, subtle as they are—yes:

“All the [ ]nges of [ ] pheno [ ] world.”

As you’d once, famously, described it.


Shadows thrown by rain- swollen spokes roll

Through us, are not us. Any miraculous radiance

We could catch in our bones


would linger with us now if it existed (It

doesn’t ). We agree to be more

than those signaling in the street, to transform ourselves, to

translate our cries of defiance into higher


registers. But do not believe what’s written

by this hand: this is a world of ill-defined

interiors, tin-work skies. I [we] pull bare shoulders back


before an age-dappled mirror: & remind myself [ourselves]:

those were your words

written in cursive flames? Your cursive scars? It is only because I [we]


care that I [we] repeat them—rather imagine these

press-on letters. It is only because X because N

because Q that I [we] came from the Aeons to be canted


along the front rooms of an abandoned farm house

(the scene of a continuous murder—note the handprints

bleeding on the wall)

that I [we] might speak

of the original, song-torn mouth and of

the streak of a,n,o,m,a,l,o,u,s,

light on a photograph that was said to have

flummoxed the aging Houdini (It didn’t);

or a tongue with an arched tip: sign of genetic fortune.



B. Commentary

heat drags at the outlines
of our bodies as we fall

toward each other. cantering
in slow motion, heads unhelmeted, we

pull at the glowing reins. heat
is another presence in our skins,

causes our pores to weep, then
welter in red seas. & always

the anger latent in these bricked-in
humors, the body’s edifices

quivering like the flesh around a superannuated eye.
this weight I lift is my personal regard

for you. at 10:45 P.M. it begins to rain
on a dying horse, steam

rolling back from its skull like a blanket
of lace.




Jesse Glass has lived and worked for over 20 years in Japan.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Michael Farrell


Telephone, Kettle Affects
 

The telephone’s writing a play. ‘How do
you do?’ it begins. ‘G’day.’ Absurd, says
the face of the critic, whose been championing
the return of that mode. The telephone
purrs, apparently happiest when working. Its
colour, however, indicates the deepest shame.

The kettle is a metal model, needing fire to
come to life. Plastic models are calmer and
say milder things. This one doesn’t hurry
yet the climax is an event each time. People
come running, as to an awaited phone call.
The first has the face of a doctor: firm but
sympathetic, prescribing herself a hot drink. 

The scene is written into the play with a
twist: the kettle lights its own matches.






Michael Farrell lives in Melbourne. He coedited Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann) with Jill Jones. His latest publications are open sesame (Giramondo) and enjambment sisters present (Black Rider).

 

 

George J. Farrah


Redaction


the fluid which is light which is liquid which is

glass which is heavy with cuts and danger

to move it in sheets which fit in dust

which move through printing

and paint or they are moving behind it

safe and in continual danger to watch

their weight go away separate

come back as a color a smudge on our side or their side

the light is on their side or our side but cuts in between if they

move or drive or stop and

recover the lid the direction

and remember the turns or the lights when

they were talking weren't talking

it remembered for them a smudge

of color on the walls on the doors

an opening in the spoon in the

telephone in the rain

to sell it not immediate not money not sold

not numb like the lake rim opening on it pleasure

or pressure in the toes on the air in it or around

swans or ducks that anger not selling pressure or

pleasure that die opening to follow them

not sold yet a flew an ached to swallow pressure

a whole a break clearing in the grain in a race

not looking not on a door not a lime or a stack

through





George J. Farrah received an MFA from Bard College, NY.

Book forthcoming from Ravenna Press, The Low Pouring Stars


His work has appeared in The Washington Review, Open 24 Hrs., Ribot, BUGHOUSE, Fourteen Hills, Disturbed Guillotine, Tight, Aileron, Fish Drum, The Columbia Poetry Review; Caldron And Net, Moria , CROWD, Xstream, MORIA, Ampersand, Elimae, Blaze VOX, BHOuse vol.2, Blue and Yellow Dog, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Los Magazine,
Anemone Sidecar and others.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Jesse Glass

Monkey Mother

Forgive us Monkey Mother
As we drive our chisels
into monumental clefts
To hew a non-falsifiable surety
Soon scoured away by typhoon & meteorite,
Pulverized by a desert breath. Forgive us
As we raze wooden idols raised in your honor
To lift phalluses of steel against your eternal day
& power our garbage scows out beyond break-waters
To drop tokens of our disdain into your terrible unknown
While others cooly pull apart the products of your fecundity
In laboratories, hospitals, butcher shops
& tap their ashes into wounds that yet feel
& sever viscera that yet distends to accommodate breath.

O we have risen up against you. Our brainpans
Forced your thighs apart & we laid screaming in your shadow.
You bent the grids of your face above us & we softened
You called us angel: we relaxed our sphincters
& shat plutonium upon the earth.

Now all things reek of our madness. We grope ourselves
At the terminus of the city, polish that monument
To pain with sacks of pulverized teeth.
You wag your finger in our faces
Yet we twist the screw through the metal plate just the same.

The moon bears witness to business-faced minions
Leveling mountains by atomic bomb
So yet another city can be fashioned
On rotting pylons driven into gravel, bones, and cesium
As you stand dispassionately on my window sill,
Fresh water & milk in plastic cups before you
One ceramic hand lifted in benediction
Thumb & forefinger fused in a pallid ring. Propped
Beside you a yellowing photograph of your long-
Forgotten manifestation: an old woman
Holding an infant in summer: My earliest self sad-eyed there,
Breathing the scent of my grandmother.

Monkey mothers gather their delicate, bisque-headed charges
& drag them near though they foul themselves in fear
Gather their cries to leather teat-ends
Broken by flea-bites beneath dull fur
& give suck though it pains them.
Lift their charges close to scabbed nostrils
& run a languid paw along their spines,
Exploring the nervous ribs, scratching the tiny bellies.

Their infants stop shrieking & soon
Assume the sleep of planetary dust as Monkey Mother
Looks up at the clouds & cracks a flea
Delicately between her teeth. She will balance this way
Beside the trembler for hours. She will lift the wizened little creature
Onto her back & climb into the highest branches of the trees
& resume her vigil, biting her knuckles, pulling her swollen
Dugs. She will stare into the night for danger as her baby
Tumbles thru darkness of animal dreams, tumbles
Through Bardos, watching the Forms shift astonishing fire
Before its uncomprehending gaze.

Mother—your blacked eyes swollen lip
Thrown out by Monkey Father in the snow
Dressed in pink nightgown that you’d bought to please him,
Pleading from window to window
To be let back in. We could not help you. We lay
Gobbing back tears in the dark as we heard your voice rise
Above the January wind. We tried to imitate stone & bone
As we curled on our sides & sucked our thumbs & held our eyes shut tight.
Forgive us your freezing fingers, thickened chest & nipples,
Your insteps stung by viper head cold.
& When you were let back in by Monkey Father,
Forgive men for the rest of that night.
Forgive us all.




Jesse Glass has lived and worked for over 20 years in Japan.



Saturday, March 23, 2013

Dan Ryan


Design Topic

In the Grand Design
of things
There was in fact
no designer.

All the elements
of existence
Formed
a single body.

 

Afterthot

As far as I know
there is no afterlife
that I have personal knowledge of
via personal experience.
 
Perhaps I've merely forgotten.
 
 
 
 
After spending an extensive number of years attempting to save the world from itself while living in
Olympia, Washington, Dan Ryan followed his sweetie to Minnie's Apple Crisp, Missinota in July 2012. Determined to approach life from a more obtuse angle, he is now a thoroughly committed Zen slacker, practicing guilt-free attachments to hanging out in coffee shops, reading all the wrong books, writing poetry, and enjoying other sensual pleasures. No longer in search of truth, he is instead looking for a good fantasy.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 


 
 

 

Paul Nelson/Bio

Paul Nelson is founder of SPLAB in Seattle and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. He wrote a collection of essays, Organic Poetry and a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, WA, A Time Before Slaughter (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger.) One of his main writing projects currently is the next chapter of the history-in-verse mode of the Slaughter poem entitled Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia.

He interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Wanda Coleman, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles, George Bowering, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, Brenda Hillman, Emily Kendal Frey & many Cascadia poets.

He has presented his poetry and poetics in London, Brussels, Vancouver, Qinghai, and Beijing, China, Victoria, Nanaimo, Lake Forest, Illinois and other places & writes an American Sentence every day.


Thursday, March 21, 2013

Ann Neuser Lederer


Ornate Molds

Disguised by ornate molds, sewn to their footpads, little fringes.
Dog troupes in tutus whistled to bears in their polished paws.

Blaze orange and phosphorescent, dottings
of dark and palpable spongy spores continue to cling to crevices:
throats, and their ilk.

Lichens adhesions crusts corrosions: the plaques of goodwill.
Outside, the sadness of trees in a row.

Animals appeared where they should not be:
a possum fell out of the ceiling.
Raccoon meandered where rabbit would have flit.

Out in the yard, dogwood budded too early,
reburied tulips fooled by a thaw.

Artifacts of teatimes: market spice, saltines and soft, sourdough cookies.
A slinging of tambourines.
Heed me they plead in hints, feathery films where they should not grow.
Stubborn, audacious yeasts still flutter,
gnats on the rims of syrup bottles





Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio and has also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky as a Registered Nurse. Prior to nursing she studied art and earned degrees in Anthropology. Her nonfiction and poetry appear in online and print journals; anthologies such as Bedside Guide, A Call To Nursing,  The Country Doctor Revisited, and Best of the Net; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies.


 






Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Jasper Brinton


composite 

Tell us not pink
at issue after the flesh—
Clouds started off late
vehicles edited the boundaries
engines took expression.
Delayed—we washed the presence
mourned the negative drift
told ourselves well done
travelled with fissionable material
sparked with displayed ecstasy.
                    The plan auto-assembled
                    similar circuit and resistances
so prolific  morningless
we were awed by a rush to physics
our cursive slumber pixelated.
                    The once adjusted burdened
a quoted eternity—narrativized
lines of oblivious structure
strewn messages behind wire.
Then the mountain fell to waves
slipped leeward became emulous
antithetical almost mesostic
such was our hard passion
wreckage on people’s lips
why the room given rightfulness
disturbed even industrious childhood.
The letter P translucent—mosaic
pivoted with the everyday panic
—I spell the savior it warned
so we wanted to say go gold
stone isn’t christ-bearing as life
self-fashioned beyond wilderness
the wilderness of a mass place
a thickness for corroded death.
 
 
 
 
 
Jasper Brinton born in Alexandria Egypt, was educated in the Middle East, Scotland and the United States. Over the years he has worked in publishing, printing, architecture, ceramics and wood.  He lives near Kimberton, Pennsylvania in a restored schoolhouse and sails the Chesapeake in an old but seaworthy sloop. His poetry has appeared in Eccolinguistics and On Barcelona.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Dan Ryan


Minions and Onions...January 2013

We…
Me and my girl Mary…the Muffin Queen herself
blastin westward on I-70 across the crazy American Heartland of our dreams
far gone into conclusion we’d reach Old Santa Fe tomorrow
auricularly grooving on Reverend Raunch and the Dope Smokin Alter Boys
current devas of the Bible Beltway

They…
the minions of the mid west... from the prairie of the Great Plains
veins flowing with the dust of that sacred and holy geography…
(Mary’s geography, actually, herself bein of the prairie)
“ Let us meet amongst the minions on the field of onions"  I suggest
“ How delicious! “ says she…” Minions and onions…I’ll make soup"
the minions being salt of the earth, poisoning the soil
(and onions)
of the mid - American continent…Ohio to Kansas
OH, HOLY KANSAS
from which Dorothy and Toto are on permanent vacation from…
where mad Americans drunk on the fear of living
beg the great questions of death…
”If you die today where will you spend ETERNITY?”
 (when you die you’re just dead…that’s it)
reptilian visionaries…what a weary bunch…
willingly waiting in line for misery at the fundamentally evangelical
Church of the Rude Awakening
(House of the Un-risen Son to unbelieving unbelievers like me)
congregated by a woebegone pitiful congregation
heads bent in worship of the existently non-existent
talking in low, whining voices
repeating over and over again “ yes…yes…yes. “
and so forth…
(I sensed the madness it put in them)
with expectant expectation for a Kansas resurrection crucifiction
(it was such fun the first time, why not again – a jucy crucy?)
violence bein a Christian - American tradition…
mad crazy Americans are addicted to it…
speakintongues holyrollin Christian soldiers
mouthfrothin ready to kill for Christ, mom and her apple pies
no thought given to indecisive indecision
mindfully gripping an ephemeral sense of a real unreality
it’s what happens when you start losing your mind…
individually and collectively

We (again)…
Me and my girl Mary…the Muffin Queen herself
in a furiously flurry of agreed upon decisions
whereby deciding Holy Kansas to be Creep City
roar off at maximum boplicity across the remaining portions of
the Sunflower State
(leavin slack-jawed gaping faces in our absence)
out-pulling the gravity of fear inherent in the inheritance of the
generally mad to be saved populous
onward and outward bein my motivational motto
out, out and away from that holysacredcow con game
no desire to travel that heavengoing highway to hell with
a busload of wingnuts
I also apparently suffering no unwillingness to sit
in soundly closed-minded judgement - without guilt or reservation…
the Muffin Queen keeping mum on the subject as we roll on into Colorado

 

 

After spending an extensive number of years attempting to save the world from itself while living in Olympia, Washington, Dan Ryan followed his sweetie to Minnie's Apple Crisp, Missinota in July, 2012. Determined to approach life from a more obtuse angle, he is now a thoroughly committed Zen slacker, practicing guilt-free attachment to hanging out in coffee shops, reading all the wrong books, writing poetry, and enjoying other sensual pleasures. No longer in search of truth, he is instead looking for a good fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, March 18, 2013

Eric Elshtain


“Wooing the Mazoo” (“We must obey the time,” Othello I.iii)

Put money in thy purse
follow thou the wars
offices’ most solvent pockets

lambent circles off officers’
helmets like coins keep
hooplas blooming, candying

over eyes sequins paraded
under-dressed as our girls
and all the pettifogs agree:

in the coarse events
selectmen choose in smoke
as we gestured empty

behind our curtainties
arranged before our being,
dream realms ghosted embrasures

sickened Quakers dropped
arrows from as mad captains
hammer doubloons to masts

follow thou the quavering
cables to mermaid’s purses—
put your money on.

Make faces hatcheries
for our kind of fresh hell.
Strum up some becomings

within the next stun-
gunned chest: freak crisp
chiefs—whatever spends—

for stuffs she chuckled,
air forced diaphragm deep
it ain’t over it ain’t over

lover—my cause is hearted—
put it to your pursed lips
sweet; sweat foreclosures

and get stinko’d as we fiddle.
The news fills us up in gold
as the rest crawl for crumbs.





Eric Elshtain is a homemaker and also the poet-in-residence at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital and UIC Hospital where he conducts poetry and art workshops with patients through Snow City Arts. He also teaches literature at the Better Boys Foundation in Chicago. Elshtain's poetry, reviews, and interviews can be found in McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary, Interim, Salt Hill, GutCult, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Fact-Simile, Kennesaw Review, and other print and on-line journals. He has a book forthcoming from Verge Books and has been the editor of Jon Trowbridge's on-line Beard of Bees Press since 2001.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Martha Deed


Morris Island Mockingbird

 

The Mockingbird on the road to Morris Island
does not sit on a fence, but rather on a metal
lobster trap though if there are lobsters off Cape Cod
I am unaware
Unaware of this bird’s ancestry
socioecomic status
party affiliation
or its reason for perching near this road
on the way to a military installation
or whether it is on Homeland Security’s
No Fly list
It does not fly when I approach
document its presence on top of the lobster trap
which in turn sits on a pile of gravel
the provenance of the gravel
also unknow
But the mystery of its age
clears with the wind
that ruffles its feathers
exposing the down underneath
too young to carry a gun
but perhaps old enough to mimic
the auto alarm sirens on Clinton Avenue
as sung by its long-dead relatives
in South Nyack, New York
Mimus polyglottos, 10 in (25 cm)
 
 
 
 
 

Martha Deed recently completed a mixed-genre book of poetry and primary documents to reconstruct her daughter, Millie Niss's death in a community hospital, The Last Collaboration (Furtherfield, 2012) and editing Millie's poetry collection, City Bird (Blazevox, 2010).  She has five previous chapbooks: The Lost Shoe, The November 2010 Project, and This is Visual Poetry all from Dan Waber's imprints, 65 x 65 (small chapbook project), and #9 (Furniture Press).  Her poems have been published in Shampoo, Moria, Edifice Wrecked, CLWN WR, Big Bridge, On Barcelona, and many others. Her website: www.sporkworld.org/Deed

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Jasper Brinton


 
moue
 
Outside
appearances are outages
invisible pigmentation
consider writing time split
cracking shells split nuts
exclaim today’s catalogue
dear reader—inks are heavenly
someone’s arbitrary constancy
before the poor terrapin
tergiversates the landline
and if hereabouts the list dulls
try a new pinch of dry herb
effacement builds the kernel
the log for surrogate paper
 
 
 
 
 
Jasper Brinton born in Alexandria Egypt, was educated in the Middle East, Scotland and the United States. Over the years he has worked in publishing, printing, architecture, ceramics and wood.  He lives near Kimberton, Pennsylvania in a restored schoolhouse and sails the Chesapeake in an old but seaworthy sloop. His poetry has appeared in Eccolinguistics and On Barcelona.