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Truck Song, You and I
The radio is hobbled in this mottled blue truck with its touches of cancerous rust,
the antenna a broken stub,
but the truck sings a 200,000 mile tune. Between muffler sputters and engine knocks,
who needs Elvis or Cheryl Crow?
The tire’s rhythmic thrumming, the periodic squeak, keep us humming into the night.
Lying in the bed at the hilltop,
we wonder who waits for the stars to burn out? The fuel gauge shows empty,
it always does,
and the odometer is unreliable. On the way home you start to worry
about how much farther we can go.
by Gregory Stapp
Need
Tell me this poem doesn’t exist on paper and needs
the red movement of a mouth.
Tell me you are in the poem.
Your lips wrap every word,
brown packaging, mailed first-class,
for the trip across the country between us.
Tell me we’ll never say this poem.
Tell me we can ride through
today in a winter of quiet.
The only papers in my wallet are lists —
groceries and wishes. Tell me these things
fill the blank flat space in its folds.
Don’t speak of emptiness or silence.
Emptiness hitched across the country,
silence filled the country.
by Gregory Stapp
qarrtsiluni 