Editor's Note on Truck, June 2015

June is a fine month for outdoor adventure, and I asked my Truck loaders to submit something that fit the rather loose topic of "playing outside." This has had fine and diverse results: playful haiku; meditative essays; an interview with artist Lewis Mark Grimes about the images he makes by physically and digitally arranging the naturally-shed feathers of endangered birds. (A careful reader may spot quite a few birds in this issue. This month's editor owns three pairs of binoculars and, while  she did not consciously intend these natural selections, does not apologize.)

Truck has also driven the reader to Scotland with James Johnston, a musician, currently touring the US with the Scottish tribal percussion-and-bagpipe band Albannach; an autodidact historian of Scotland and its centuries of convoluted politics; and, under the nom de hike Gentle James of the Glens, a trail guide and fixture in Scottish conservation and hillwalking circles. ("Hillwalking" is a Scottish euphemism for "everything but the most technically difficult mountain climbs; you probably won't need to bring oxygen.") The essay is a joyous travelogue, a man-meets-motorbike romance, and the reader's senses will send them flying down the highways on a vintage Triumph alongside Johnston.
 
I hope that in between reading the contributions piled in the back of the June Truck, the reader will go outside, even for a few breaths of coming rain, and enjoy the fleeting pleasures of dandelions -- and perhaps hear the murmur of grown-ups, sipping gin and tonic as they sit on the porch talking about grown-up things and watching distant storm clouds roll closer.

Gwyn McVay
June 2015

Anny Ballardini

Truck, November Issue

2014

This November,

With a well in my self

Draining water to saints

Kierkegaard’s paradox

From Socrates’s endless testing

Rules

While looking into the black pond

For answers

__God answers

Inwardly

This November,

Appalling month

Over 100 answered

Joining mine to theirs – yours / ours

Under Saint Cecilia’s patronage

Musicians blew their horns

Organs woke many

While the girl grew ecstatic

In thinking she could

Be

This November,

Thick in air stuffed with light

In closed rooms

At night

Trying to think

When thought gets lost

In and out of self

To accommodate

Past / future events

On a ten fragmented score

This November,

Has seen mountain peaks

Kneel

Sturdy Siqueiros’s hands

Leak tears and grow roses

On Time’s façade

Ancestors chant

Interpretative Chinese lantern plants

Decorate Proust’s monumental

Writings

This November,

Talks

Of seeds and piano keys

Of herbs

Of

Of vincristine

Of

Of crashed & renewed hopes

Of the makers of Illusions

Of a Leap of Faith

This November,

Smiles down at us

With its temperate sun

Its derailed tracks

Its alarm clocked underground routine

Messages on trains and greyhound busses

Slit throats bathed in the forgiveness of popes

Sacraments soaked in the concept of

Anxiety

Brevity

This November,

Without choice

The eleventh

Set as an Acheronian stud in a cameo

The rows of windows

People dis/appear in dim streets

They dis/appear in my mail

Their white poems against the black of Truck

With my acknowledgment to my

Moving November Poets

This November,

In the life of all

Distanced in our flesh

Distracted in our oaths

Hyper-attentive

Booted steps in echoing bells

Coats / cloaks

“Anything but loss”

Pleading for the word God gives to the Just

From those milky sky-s.

This November, 

Cold at the end

In the bones

With Thanksgiving on Fb

Teas honey chestnuts

Coughing

Giving thanks:

The girl is still alive

Distant

But still alive.

© Anny Ballardini

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Call for works November 2014 Issue

Dedicated to my Father and to Maxine, my niece

We study, work, spare, spend, walk around, talk a lot or not much, we keep on giving life for granted until our fixed appointment with destiny strikes the main chord of our selves, be it a disease or the death of someone we love. After the passing of my Father about four years ago, and my 10-year-old niece’s disease, I have been trying to find answers. How does / or can contemporary poetry, visual work, images reflect Goethe’s Der Erlkoening, what Edvard Munch in an hallucinatory way in his cold Norway depicted around the turn of last century, or re-project Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night:

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Halvard Johnson has just appointed me to be the new Editor of Truck for the month of November, the month of the Dead. Do send over your work if you think it somehow answers some of our questions.

Link to Truck:

http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it

© Anny Ballardini, Truck’s November Editor


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