Thursday, May 17, 7 p.m. Sam Lohmann and Linda Russo

Sam Lohmann is the author of Stand on this picnic bench and look north (Publication Studio, 2011) and several chapbooks. He edits the poetry fanzine Peaches and Bats, coedits Airfoil chapbooks with David Abel, and is one of the organizers of the Spare Room reading series. He lives in Portland, teaches preschool and attends librarian school.

 Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press) and the recipient of fellowships at the Centrum Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Millay Colony. Her essay "Precious, Rare, and Mundane" is the preface to Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). She currently lives in the Columbia River Watershed, tending her community garden vegetable patch and teaching at Washington State University.






By Sam Lohmann:


(from Shake Well)
*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

OK
Cancel day
& wreak delite—
A burlap boxkite
diary instead—installed
with respect to the dead
stall in the skip
to hear the dust
hum the thin black letters

. . . . . . . . .

Can you hear the harbor going flat
Rotten odds dilute the timbre
Basic black all down the line
to spite description
A ritual shucking
Someone wrote
ARM WRESTLING
PRESSED GLASS MIX
on a cardboard box

. . . . . . . . .

Our hands can’t share a shadow
much less open a building
Crying restarts the video game
“Glow-in-the-Dark Nite Thoughts”
this time slightly fuzzier
that potion is your last life
extended in a perfect cartwheel
towards the dead
& I’m totally winning


By Linda Russo:

SHORT CRISP CHIP

flight call is a sharp, distinctive plick

            what is happiness?

driven out into the rain, not an ordinary rain

but the rain of unselfconsciousness

     studded with letters of introduction

I am thus connected, the human right or rite

     of many centuries, a spectacle

which seems to be in conflict

            the call is a short crisp chip rich with possibility

I react to people one way

     but I could react that way