Four Poems by Amy MacLennan
Runaway Truck Ramp
It’s your last chance. You checked
your brakes at the stop,
but still they failed.
The sluggish morning
climbing a mountain at twenty,
twenty-five—gone
when you crested,
and now the needle arcs high
across big numbers. It’s all
getting away from you. The truck
gunning down the ‘state,
pine trees whipping by.
Horn blasts drowning your heart.
You flash on a slip of chocks
beneath wheels at the dock,
but all you feel is mean physics
while a ramp waits for you
to hit those rocks,
make the gravel fly,
like love, like ruin.
Ghost Ships
We find them sometimes,
drifting at sea
or maybe just off the coast,
vessels without captains,
not a soul, except
that of the boats, and they
never tell us a thing.
There’s a trawler, the High Aim,
loaded with three tons
of tuna, rotting now,
down near Perth.
In a quarantine bay,
police search her, look
for a struggle (piracy maybe)
but find no sign.
There is fuel and food,
just no one aboard, and she’s
come far, three thousand miles.
Authorities think she probably
steered herself. But what
of the crew, where did they go?
The cops, flat out,
don’t know. Her berths
are empty, the bare deck clean.
To the Elevator Engineers
The ‘scrapers are taller
and your job (a dance
of physics and design) is to make
our elevators fly.
I know constraints of cement
and metal don’t allow
much slack. Still,
the chambers rise,
flaunting gravity, slicing air.
And you do know the limits.
Our plunge through floors
must be stopped. Velocity,
after all, is fixed.
But do you dream of endless speed?
I think you would hurl us
through those buildings, streaking
higher and faster
until our eardrums snap,
no matter the pressure
or the cost. The worries
rush to my head
every time the double doors
hush shut. How much
do you love your shafts
of space? How far would you go
to have your cables hum?
Up
Most times the alarm cuts through,
high tones that jerk me
to sudden morning. It takes a weekend
for honest waking, the swim up
through a wild league of ocean,
last breath of sleep to carry me
from the reaches, ears ringing, just
a blur left from the quieting city below.
About the author
Amy MacLennan loves traveling to places like Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Talent, Oregon (which has the best curried tuna salad sandwich ever). Amy's work…
Read the full bio