Three Poems (Marc Vincenz)

Democracy Wall

for Wei Jingsheng and Huang Xiang

Look what’s pasted here—

Poet on the wall says

we’re all dictators, despots

shouldering to get in first.

Old men

with inflated superegos.

Besides, what the fuck does he know?

He’s only a lad.

Enlightened poets carve their

words in stone—

these just whimper,

blow away like leaves

in a storm.

He might as well

scratch them

in the sky.

Atomkraft 1967

Zhong Guo means the middle country;

the middle way, the path to liberation.

Coal thieves on scooters

dig from the middle of the earth,

separate the temporal from the permanent,

burn fires that melt iron ore

and draw curtains over the skies.

The old man wished for the atom bomb,

but Stalin wouldn’t give it to him.

In 1967, he got it.

He dredged fish from lifeless rivers,

fed souls with limp clothes

and hungry eyes.

As we were told, in our Village Cooperatives

and People’s Communes,

real miracles could happen.

In 1970, he launched satellites

straight into heaven,

to give us an eye

on the world.

I’ve been told you can’t split the atom

any way but down the middle.

Monkey Brains

We ate monkey brains in secrecy

just to see what they tasted like,

as if they might remind us of you;

and although the ancient custom

was to strap the chosen primate

in a made-for-measure cabinet

with only the shaved cranium exposed,

crush the skull-bone with a golden hammer,

while she screamed and whimpered,

begging for the beginning of time;

an experience, I’ve been told, like no other,

we preferred them fried in garlic and onions

separated from the body,

dipped them in rice wine vinegar.

You got sick after that, struggled

for ten days and nights,

dampening the sheets with your toxins.

I knew you’d live.

You wanted to die.

I remember the morning your fever broke

was the morning the H5N1 virus

flamed across the country,

everyone was wearing a blue mask

and we no longer feared the secret police.

At its most basic level, Mao’s Mole is a cinematic journey through China’s last hundred-or-so years, offering snapshots, incidental reflections and moments of flux across a broad spectrum of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens and their foreign guests. On wider levels, the book poses deep questions of society, identity and culture; Mao’s Mole concerns itself with the development of icons, figureheads and modern mythology in today’s China; with the making of modern nations; with our dented twenty-first century mythologies.

-- Marc Vincenz

Dice (Nico Vassilakis)

dice

The eternal circumstance of a shipwreck’s depth When gravity declares. Drops through filters it’s made for itself a laughing bottom.

Beyond former calculations Loosened rivets undo. Mathematical wonder, passed known cartography and modes.

Whose dread the veil of illusion rejected Struggles with phantom tucked oppression. A balance holds sway.

And cradles the virgin index Results in tempo the entire surface area undulates. Reorganization!

The rigid whiteness Miraculous and broken. The forgetting yes, the forgotten coin this.

Slim dark tallness Keen to deteriorate. Through switches that near parallelism threatens.

To bury itself in the original foam To those things we need fixed. The denominators, common and unswerving.

The memorable crisis Arrives and does so repeatedly.

first line of each stanza is Mallarmé

To fold paper enough. To make it sing at the crease.

-- Nico Vassilakis

Three Poems (Bill Yarrow)

INVERSIONS OF POUND: CANTO I

Sun-rays of glitter with flour white with mixed water, wine sweeter then, and mead; first speech hurried in, cried I, and spirit pitiful, dead, impotent, impetuous the off, keep to… Sat I sternward from winds and weeping with heavy shouting with me, about crowded many these tender girls tears recent with stained souls, brides of dead, cadaverous Erebus; unguarded ladder long the down going…came Anticlea then and companions all lose. Odysseus then said, blood, ever unpierced mist, close-webbed, with covered heads, lance bronze, with mauled many men, sword narrow: the unsheathed cities peopled and lands Kimmerian, the bronze of slain sheep herds the slaughtered beasts more for men. My to cried, me upon pallor canvas bellying with onward out us bore, there men wretched over stretched night, swartest seas dark over Neptune, spiteful through return: shalt eyelids dark with thou bands, breast and girdles, coast dark, this to come? Thou art. How? Elpenor first spoke and me knew, wand, golden his holding.

ANTHROPOMETAMORPHISM

I have known a head become a callus, matriculate, stop shaving, move to Vegas

I have known a mouth become a gland, install a flange, sail to the Western Isles

I have known a bicep become a tear duct, argue its authority, sabotage the patriots

I have known a skin tag become a pustule, take up the flugelhorn, exterminate the badinage

I have known a heart become a kidney, vibrate, grow wings, fly off, into the piss

KICKING OUT THE ENJAMBS

I can be iambic when I want to be! Another day, another dolor… The forgotten man has been: forsaken. The forsaken man has been: forgotten. For heaven’s forsake [n]. Looky, looky, everything’s très mystique. Usury for you? Misery for me. Agita for breakfast? Telos for dinner. What price, tag? Wake me when the narcoleptics arrive.

The Pound poem is made up entirely of inverted lines and phrases from Canto I of The Cantos by Ezra Pound.

Anthropomorphism + metamorphism = anthropometamorphism.

Kicking Out the Enjambs: disrhythmic pentameter.

-- Bill Yarrow

Estate Tax (Celia Bland)

  

I inherit a house wracked with ringworm, pocked

by woodpeckers.   I come into an attic packed with pudendas,

that is: moldy peach jam, pin cushions, and notions, that is,

expired insurance policies, half-melons of dirt dauber colonies

like clay rinds, like seeded flesh.

Stones, that is, pits sucked and spat into a dusty corner bequeathed

to me with the carapace of a mummified wasp, brown

recluse, caterpillar larvae, even a snake skin, crackling like

peanut shells underfoot.  This is just the third floor.

I inherit furnished rooms.

A space heater with frayed cord on the coiled rag rug

flattened like a whirlpool in the parlor. A tv with a greening screen

and a volume range from mutter to scream. 

My gross income, my net: kitchen cabinets shiny w/ stew beef grease & livermush grease -- the kind you scribble in w/ your

fingernail: mine.  And a sink w/ a ring round

the bung-hole like those spatter plates

below the coils of the stove.  Deduct these rings.

They are dependents of the boing of spigot drips – that is,

the moon’s curve and submerged currents – that is,

upon water breaking and labor.  Deduct that void.

Dependent memories you can still claim.

My taxed knees, bowing beneath the lintels

and beams, my shoulders hoisting the glass & brass chandelier that

spiders the plaster above my dining table, say love. 

Say I love you. That is, forgiveness calculated in lines and numbers. 

Skip these. 

Deduct my assets, that is What is mine.

I leave it all to you.

In “The Death of an Author,” literature, according to Barthes, is “the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” 

This trap might be the one that catches seeds and tomato skins and chunks of dog food in my sink’s bunghole. Or maybe it’s constructed of sharpened bamboo and reeds on some WWII movie set in Burma. Or a dangerous temptation like lust or chocolate cherries. Is this the identity, lost in its narrative trajectory, that succumbs to the kneejerk frame of “Call me Ishmael,” or “I’m Nobody – who are you?”

The voice in “Estate Tax” began, quite literally, as the voice of Nobody, putt-putting from phrase to phrase, as it inventories what’s left behind after a death (of the author?). This is a real house I lived in one summer when my parents took a country place rent free in exchange for cleaning out the detritus of forty years of hillbilly pack-ratting. I am still haunted by the sedimentary layers of cloth, of coats, of shirts, of boxes of buttons, of recipes (receipts) and the once-valued, now useless detritus of lives left to strangers to dispose of. This house looms as the interior of my mind: a sink trap of peelings, inherited axioms, and these dearly purchased sieves of identity: mine, love, dependencies.

This poem, this litany of contents, requires a human voice to animate it. Then, in a final flourish, it wills it all —taxed and deducted -- to the reader, to the you.

-- Celia Bland

Three Poems (Hugh Behm-Steinberg)

Marketing

For ghosts, time stops; they just have a single now all to themselves. Sometime you see them, but they never see you, they only see themselves. There’s a lot of them, and their purchasing power is immense. But marketing to them is tricky. Only by making ads ubiquitous among the living makes it likely newborn ghosts will see them. Even then they’ll only see the ad in front of them. Their wanting will want forever if the campaign is successful. “Coke adds life” says the ad, but my mother’s ghost drinks vodka out of spite. She will buy the same thing over and over, and her compulsion will become my longing.

On the Angelic

An angel appears and he makes you choose, or he asks you a question you hoped never to have to answer, and your choices are always terrible, and your answers even worse. And though you’re supposed to feel blessed seeing one, because he confirms everything, you hate him on sight because he looks so joyous as he tortures you. Never alone, he says, laughing, never alone.

So despite their ubiquity, no one consults them anymore, their solutions go unrecognized, as unconsidered as the sky when a man encounters obstacles. The angels continue to meet, draft papers, march, judge, delegate. I think we should move to an atheistic country, he says to you, in glorious light, where we will at least be admired or persecuted.

Ascetic Acid

The effects are disappointing, you get some hallucinations but they’re so restrained. You remember that you’re naturally transparent, that if you just relaxed in your trip you could be fully invisible. Nothing is worth seeing anyway says the drug, and because it’s inside you you find it very convincing. When you come down you’re naked and you’ve given away all your possessions, weeping with joy. You feel light and happy to feel that way. The hangover will last for years. 




These pieces originated in a daybook project in which I recorded my first thought each day after waking up in the morning. I took the raw pieces that seemed like narratives and polished/tightened them up a little. Spiritual concerns brought across from liminal space.

-- Hugh Behm-Steinberg

There is the Wear (Susan Lewis)

of thought that cuts & floats without blight or bile. There is the fine particularity of subatomic particles. There is the clouds’ rosy hole through which creation peeks, then beckons, then retreats. As for the frantic lives of animals & plants, the faux stillness of minerals, the bell curve of phase change — I am confident in osmosis, both cognitive & saline. I am certain of limits, as limitations litter my fear, like plastic isles in a hapless green sea. You swallow animal, mineral, & vegetal. Twenty questions bare identities not yours, which slips & slides from my desire like false advertising, false promise, or truthful testimony. In the world of bats, dinner is charted geometrically. In the world of foresight, death has long tentacles, prying backwards, spoiling some moments, enhancing others. To regret sentience is to be ready for the next brutal blessing.

This is one of a new batch of prose poems which I am accruing in layers to populate a new collection.  It was born in the mountains, during a particularly gaudy sunset, decked out in late summer colors but carrying with it the chill of the changing season. I scribbled in the dwindling light, while the first bats swooped by in near-silence, hunting for dinner.

-- Susan Lewis

Mustaches of Slaughtered Heroes (William Doreski)

Framed in expressive black oak, your watercolors stick to the wall like leeches. Frost hikes its skirts at the pond’s edge where geese chat about flying to Kentucky. Do I hear a drumroll enter

your small conversation? Do stones at the bottom of the pond expect to testify? Other events squeeze from the tubes of paint arranged by hue and cry. Brushes become mustaches of slaughtered heroes.

In gusts of small talk you project the naked retorts of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Half mind, half sun, you’re anything but flesh now that flesh has lost its fashion. Your horizons sport crows and jays

to herd away the geese that spangle your lawn with gray wet droppings. Yet the bird wars occur mainly in literature you’re too proud to read. I prop myself against a wall and wait for the pond to freeze with tingling

and cries of pain. Your husband plans to stay up all night and whisper your fetishes to the stars. Why should you care? Sparks roughed from visiting boulders tender light and heat enough to ease you

into those last gestures artists require for their celestial fame. Your water colors resist you just enough to cling to three or four dimensions, honoring or more likely blaming you.

I’ve always been interested in the intersections of diverse media, particularly painting and poetry. But while I’ve written my share of ekphrastic poems, I prefer to explore the ways in which these media differ: particularly in the ways that technique enables or defers certain kinds of exploration. Some of the ancient Chinese poets wrote poems that subtly but specifically exploit the advantages poetry has over painting: e.g., the ability to narrate and convey motion. This poem challenges a painter to enter the world of language to supplement her aesthetic vision. In the end, it argues that to the extent that she honors the autonomy of her art it will reward or punish her with a world view that isn’t necessarily her own. Of course poems do the same, so those mustaches of slaughtered heroes represent the sacrifice of self we all make to our chosen art.

-- William Doreski

Kultur-Error (Daniele Pantano)

I found "Kultur-Error" on my kitchen table -- between a mother's suicide note and a pile of letters from a certain Nazi war criminal who is hiding in Switzerland -- about two or three or four months ago, or perhaps it was last week. The note attached to it said, "Good luck! This changes nothing." 

"Kultur-Error" is part of the visual strand of my Mass Graves project, which I've  been working on for the past seven years. The first two excerpts from Mass Graves -- Mass Graves: XIX–XXII and Mass Graves: City of Now -- can be purchased from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press (http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk).

-- Daniele Pantano

Truck's new driver/editor for November

Truck welcomes Alexander Cigale, who will be at the wheel for the month of November.

Many thanks go to Chris Lott for keeping Truck on the road during October.

Truck's editors/drivers past, present and future as of Dec. 2, 2013

Present

Catherine Daly

Future


Jan. 2014 -- Maria Damon
Feb. 2014 -- John Oughton
March 2014 -- MaryLee Bragg and Colin Morton
Apr. 2014 -- Alan Sondheim
May 2014 -- Glenn Bach
June 2014 -- Bill Pearlman
July 2014 -- Gloria Avner and David Gitin
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