Hello,

I'm working on a novel of the Southwest. This month I'd like to share some chapters with readers of Truck. The first posting will be the first 4 chapters of DEARTH. More postings will come at approximately weekly intervals. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Truck's new editor for April 2016

Sorry to say that, due to health problems, Paul Sampson was not able to make the trip in April. Thanks anyway, Paul, and get well soon. Even sooner.

Our driver for April is Lynda Schor. Please welcome her.

Truck editors/drivers--past, present and future--as of April 1, 2016

Present

Lynda Schor

Future


May 2016 -- Allen Bramhall
June 2016 -- Joanna Howard
July 2016 --  Larry Goodell
Aug. 2016 -- Lori Horvitz
Sept. 2016 -- Tero Hannula
Oct. 2016 -- Laura Young
Nov. 2016 -- Ric Carfagna
Dec. 2016 -- Philip Garrison


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
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 -- Anny Ballardini
Dec. 2014 -- Chris Lott

Jan. 2015 -- Marc Vincenz
Feb. 2015 -- mIEKAL aND
Mar. 2015 -- Eileen Tabios
Apr. 2015 -- Crag Hill
May 2015 -- Rudolfo Carrillo
June 2015 -- Gwyn McVay
July 2015 -- Matt Margo
Aug. 2015 -- Volodymyr Bilyk
Sept. 2015 -- Stephen Vincent
Oct. 2015 -- Maxianne Berger
Nov. 2015 -- Alexander Jorgensen
Dec. 2015 -- Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Jan. 2016 -- Michael Rothenberg
Feb. 2016 -- CL Bledsoe
Mar. 2016 -- Paul Sampson

Truck's new editor for March 2016 -- Paul Sampson

Please welcome Paul Sampson, who will be at the wheel of Truck through the month of March 2016.

Many thanks go to CL Bledsoe for his yeoman's work during February.

Truck's editors -- past, present, and future -- as of March 1, 2016

Present

Paul Sampson

Future


Apr. 2016 -- Lynda Schor
May 2016 -- Allen Bramhall
June 2016 -- Joanna Howard
July 2016 -- Robert Archambeau
Aug. 2016 -- Lori Horvitz
Sept. 2016 -- Tero Hannula
Oct. 2016 -- Laura Young
Nov. 2016 -- Ric Carfagna
Dec. 2016 -- Philip Garrison


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
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 -- Anny Ballardini
Dec. 2014 -- Chris Lott

Jan. 2015 -- Marc Vincenz
Feb. 2015 -- mIEKAL aND
Mar. 2015 -- Eileen Tabios
Apr. 2015 -- Crag Hill
May 2015 -- Rudolfo Carrillo
June 2015 -- Gwyn McVay
July 2015 -- Matt Margo
Aug. 2015 -- Volodymyr Bilyk
Sept. 2015 -- Stephen Vincent
Oct. 2015 -- Maxianne Berger
Nov. 2015 -- Alexander Jorgensen
Dec. 2015 -- Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Jan. 2016 -- Michael Rothenberg
Feb. 2016 -- CL Bledsoe

Ace Boggess

Depressive Episodes

She buries herself in murk & lonely earth

like a mole streaking to hide from footsteps.

Mole is also another word for spy,

like Aldrich Ames trading secrets for the lie of money

instead of the competing lies of flags.

Spy serves as synonym for see,

as in: if we could afford it,

we’d travel to see the tulips at Les Tuileries,

an unmanned rocket burning on its pad,

the world’s largest ball of twine,

an execution, though we don’t agree.

But, see as well means prophesy,

a fancy way of saying fear the future,

which she does, which is why

I want to tell her all will be right.

She’s built herself a grave for midnights &

sleeps in it as though the dark she wears

like a casket shell is the sole safe place

on this bastard of a planet where she lives.

* * *

How I Knew Charlie

He threw his crack pipe on my dashboard,

leaned out my window like a dirt-blond cocker spaniel,

howling at the women we passed. This was after

he held a hunter’s knife against my throat

because his mother sold me pills, & he wanted to be the one

to score a few bucks, to run the show.

Chaos business was the biggest brand in any parking lot

behind some hick bar so unknown its name changed twice a year.

How many strangers shook my hand with a baggie in between? &

Charlie? Last time I saw him, we were both in jail:

sober, muted. I read in the paper

how he robbed a woman for thirteen dollars,

threatening her with a broken bottle

That was Charlie: coked up, drunk,

small-time with ambitions, stupid-crazy like a spider

drowning inches from the slippery cyan wall of a swimming pool.

* * *

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). His novel, A Song without a Melody, is forthcoming from Hyperborea Publishing. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Jessie Carty

The Fourth Dimensional Flea Market

There’s a white, round, taped-down sticker on my mother’s gravy boat. $12. I’ve seen it, in other universes, for 10. 15. I don’t always buy it, but in this world, I collect my mother’s Pyrex pattern: green with white daisies.

From another vendor I negotiate $10 for a $20 framed crochet of a rainbowed snail.

I buy a rusting birdcage because in one plane I had a cockatiel when I was nine that never learned to talk.

While the seller is making change, I pocket a pair of webbed earrings, complete with dangling spiders, because in every dimension I find a pair to steal.

On most I sneak them back onto the shelf.
On most.

* * *

Concessions

You are too early for the movie so you watch the concession stand.

You think the little girl, who can’t stand still, will ask for Fun Dip; for the activity it takes to obtain the sugary powder from the pouches with nothing more than a candy based chalky stick.

The big guy by himself will want to upsize his combo, but he'll stick to his small diet coke and a soft pretzel.

The girl on her first date will ask for the freshness of Junior Mints even though she’s craving the Butterfinger Bites because she knows chocolate would be messy and she's wearing pale yellow. Her date will decide on a tactile treat: Twizzlers.

You haven’t decided what you’ll have, but you hope they have tea. And maybe you’ll add a medium popcorn, denying your desire for the round satisfaction of a large tub.

You can already feel the rhythm of piece after piece of the popcorn carefully selected and placed on your tongue. The salt. How your pace quickens as you reach in for handfuls, noting the sandy sensation of the bag, nearly empty, before the trailers are even done.

* * *

Jessie Carty is the author of seven poetry collections which include the chapbook An Amateur Marriage (Finishing Line, 2012) which was a finalist for the 2011 Robert Watson Prize and her newest full length collection Practicing Disaster which was published by Aldrich Press in 2014.

Dave K

there are so many ways to say ‘fundamentally unemployable’ at great length


the window reflects my open mouth and
i line up the cars with my teeth as they
surround the black tongue of the street

on busy nights they pack into the gumline
grinding and scraping and exchanging plaque

one time a guy ran out of his car
left the hazards blinking
and jumped into oncoming traffic
the decal on his back windshield said FLORIST
his license plate said NHLST with the vowels missing

he was jutting halfway out of the space
he would never fit and he knew that and
now it’s someone else’s problem

an impacted kind of wisdom, this

sometimes it’s like my brain is a dick
and my skull is a fist and my blood is
gushing from all the holes in my head

i still keep one of that guy’s teeth
in my wallet when enough of mine
fall out i’ll make it fit
this is my gift to him



* * *


for whom the Chris Tolls (dedicated to Chris Toll)



why is work in twerking? that
shit is supposed to be fun.
who put the manslaughter in
laughter? wait, reverse that
one or it won't work.

i see trenchcoats flapping like
sheets on a line and a whole
Chekov's arsenal of guns unfired.
there is more ado in an avocado than
about nothing.

i scrape plaque from my teeth with
my fingernail and wish i'd brought
some sunglasses.

i can't see through all this light.
there is too much cum in this
cucumber for my taste.

we have about a billion years left.
that's not as long as forever.
someday the sun will die
and its last rays will wrap
around the earth and its final
words will ride on stellar winds
i'm sorry
i'm sorry
i'm sorry
i'm sorry




* * *


Dave K.'s work has been published in Front Porch Journal, Welter, Writers & Words, Artichoke Haircut, and Cobalt, and he is the author of stone a pig and MY NAME IS HATE. When Dave K. isn't writing, he spends his time as a tributary of the Bobu River in Romania.

Ed Madden

After long silence



My father is a puzzle box. He’s a map folded up.

The nurse says he has something to tell me.
He stares at me, but never tells me.

My mother is a vase tipped over.
Daylilies bloom one day, and each day is another.

So many vases left over after her accident,
stacked in the closet, like empty wrappers, like magic.

My father is a shrunken head and a blanket.
What do you want to say, old man, that you haven’t said already?

Outside, a skunk or something shuffling on the carport, the light is on.

My father is a box of lamentations, unsaid.
My mother is a blue jar.

Listen: my mother’s soft snoring, the daylilies furled in the dark.

* * *

Field guide, after the floods*

1.

In March, when we got the diagnosis, drove him home,

there were redbuds in bloom along the road,

out back where the barn fell,

in the front yard, covered with poison ivy we can’t kill,

and buckeyes coming up along the ditch, shoots

like red fingers, new leaves red as bruises,

and dock leaves along the road like tongues.

II.

Where the Stitt house used to be: hyacinth, vetch,

and everywhere dead nettle.

At the woodpile: leather flower.  Under the cypress: dayflower.

Out back: henbit and wood sorrel,

cut-leaved primrose, skullcap, dog fennel.

 

III.

In the fields, buttercup and vetch as the floods receded,

and later, as the plows began their business, something we’d never seen:

 

bear tracks. My cousin took a photo on his phone.

Days later, the newspaper reported two bears hit and killed on local roads.

 

* * *

Landscape, with levees*
           ‘If this is the middle, how long does it last?’
                                Luisa A. Igloria



Yesterday, they put up levees in the field
across the road, the new rice a green sheen,
the levees ready for what’s to come.
When I drive to town, I leave the windows
down, drink in the smell of well water,
metallic, cold. We think we’ve been close,
but can’t know. That weekend he was away 
from us, his eyes glazed and moving around
the room, his hands picking at the blanket, 
his feet twitching, jerking beneath the sheets.
That morning he couldn’t breathe.

Since I’ve been here, the floods have receded
from the fields, the men and tractors taken
over—landplanes leveled the field for the coming
rows, a red Case IH and a huge
John Deer pulling the yellow planes,
the long silver blades across the field.

Disk and plow have turned stubble under,

and weeds, the trees along the ditch filled out

thick and green. The river stalled a while,

so much water coming down the ditch

it ran backward for two days, but that’s passed.

The nurse blames the moon for dad’s moods,

says there was a solar eclipse the day

he decided to die, though all his vital signs

were fine. That night he said goodbye, leaned back

in bed, and waited. Nothing happened, and he was

mad, the next morning, that he hadn’t

been taken. I’m still here? Outside we could hear

the tractors starting on another field.

* * * 

Born and raised in rural Arkansas, Ed Madden teaches at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of three previous books of poetry—Signals (USC, 2008), which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Prodigal: Variations (Lethe, 2011), and Nest (Salmon, 2014). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2007, The Book of Irish American Poetry, and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, and online at the Good Men Project. In 2015 he was named the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina.

*"Field guide, after the floods" and "Landscape, with levees" originally appeared in The Arkansas Review. All three of these poems are from Madden's collection Ark, forthcoming in March from Sibling Rivalry Press. About the book:  In a spring of floods, a son returns to rural Arkansas to help care for his dying father. A difficult and beautiful book about a father’s death from cancer, Ark is also a book about family, about old wounds and new rituals, about the extraordinary importance of ordinary things at the end of life, about the gifts of healing to be found in the care of the dying.  At once a memoir in verse about hospice care and a son’s book-length lament for his father, Ark is a book about the things that can be fixed, and those that can’t.

Chris Fullerton

Tones of Home

A black-tongued boy eating dirt on the side
of the house with a plastic spoon from a yellow

metal dump truck, A yellow-haired girl standing
in the park beneath a gray sky with a broken kite 

dangling from a twisted dead oak tree, A graying
man leaning against the brick façade of a downtown

building drinking two dollar wine from a bottle
in a brown paper bag, A brown-eyed saint, head

in hands, feet buried in the white sand of a beach
at dawn frigid from a February wind next to a smoldering

bonfire, A borrowed white car loaded down with black
garbage bags in the middle lane of an eastbound interstate,

They’ll say that they miss you,
but they never actually notice you
until you’re already gone.

* * *


Know Your Surroundings

There’s a barn behind
the new house
(not a barn, but a barn-like shed)
gray wood to match
the afternoon storms
empty, save for a stray
scorpion and a leftover
can of wood-stain.
just beyond,
a field of pine seedlings,
the cusp of sequestration,
silence permeates
the neighborhood
every third house
empty, a community
foreclosed and liquidated.

The plywood floor creaks
beneath my weight,
stepping carefully
like a trespasser,
imagining the possibilities
of creation
or destruction, planing
pine into a table
or a makeshift coffin,
was central Florida
ever the “new frontier”
more than it is
right now,
cloaked in loneliness
I feel limitless
as the afternoon rain
begins to fall.




* * *




Christopher Fullerton is a writer living with two friends, four dogs, and a tortoise in San Antonio, Texas, but he's still never been to the Alamo. He keeps forgetting.