Five Poems by Sam Lohmann

SEA BREEZE

Don’t worry, gravity wells up
like lust and our endless cackling
not thinking of anything
the cresting tip of a squiggle

Nobody sees it
squiggle onward, justice done
as a kind of reciprocal scrubbing
dove for dove

So here have a city in a bottle instead
Give it a shake it remains “American”
with dead trees and a gym and more
dead trees and a neck to cry through

People made up interiors
to have to go to sea, sigh
under Venus rising, the flame of
Consent: bribing the seagulls with

Camparis by the rough Atlantic shingle
I get dizzy waiting for the Cold
War to wind down
“Erotic Correspondence School”

fills the air with its weaving
and I get lost in the wallpaper
It is a kind of laughter
The Wednesday hot lunch is New England boiled dinner

becoming, in the right outfit, the weather

(in the prickles)

Can I live so I forget to
age into that field puffball
falling apart? It wasn’t my dream
anyway it was my driveway
and you were there and you
talked about me like we were
a Henry James novel that stretched
from our foreheads to flowering
cherry trees. Suddenly

I’m “suddenly,” I’m “but then,” this
imaginary line across
your shoulders as you row
an impossible boat, saying
Lovers can stop fucking and carry
on loving as you carry a
stitch forward. Without a
thought sometimes. Where have my fingers
been, where can they go, get me
a fast car, the vanishing
kind I identify with

that's so far beyond me
we can live with this horizon
but the problem remains:
to construe yourself into it
like a kind of outside pawn
with glutes, propelled into the fourth row
on style alone
here in my driveway,
standing a little apart,

in love with two people
so everything has an echo like
“Is this how we change?”
Dunno but I’ll keep turning
the ectoplasm crank,
staring into the distance of
my child’s early childhood when
I should have been stomping eggshells
you know, deliberately?

Now the drowned book expands
in the tub as an
attack of facts, self-displaced, self-skeptical, so
Narcissus consulting the floating
stems is made to talk through
Snarky Skeletor then
mosey away down caverns curving
off into punchline, paydirt,
prenatal dark, ultraviolet
hindsight. Okay, goodbye.

But nothing happens
all at once. A cloud
changing out of need
fills the air with its weaving
and you and I clack
like dominoes, these
specific colors
entangle friends and sweethearts
(not derogatory) in
the prickles with the cool kids:
You, me, Narcissus,
Skeletor, the James Bros.,
the Kid with the Bouncing Ball,
and we’re all buzzing
in different rooms with our lists.
We’re these athletes of vertigo
with oatmeal on our sleeves, in
different rooms but together
in the work if you can call
it that. My big chore
now to quiet down.
Then I can wash a skillet,
accomplish everything, take
a bath, wash a skillet, pass through the eyehole of a bronze mask.

(skipping)

Sometimes an unprompted riff
sets everything aleak, like crushed
aromatics you can’t keep
for a moment, that stop you for
weeks as a kept eavesdropper
who wants to know the story whole,
that is, as a sum of desires,
and not become a desert
father as a matter
of style, not have to go lie down
among the hot stones made for
skipping, smooth and flat, if there were
any water, but wants to be planted
tuft and prickle, like the riff
says, love lives in jealousy,
travels in insecurity,
sips at faults, and like, what if
no one bit down on that?

Sometimes I think, “Oh
this is a case of the winnowing
of a desire down to
a need, of a person down to a
user given a
task in an itchy knowledge domain.”
Some riff will have them
seeing a livid face in every
thing, and everything
won't settle down. And doesn’t matter
ever land? Only
in jellybean bodies’ etudes when
we sleep? And some say
it's the loveliest thing of all but
in my tin helmet
I say it’s a carwash transplanted
to every country.
Some say in the dark
under the frayed quilt dome
chaotic partners nuzzle, but
what among friends is
amateur foley?

Sometimes consent to
burrow, resurface, watch a movie,
be what perception
attacks. Sometimes we find we’re at war
with some stochastic
bullshit, fallen prey to gravity
and friction. Sometimes
we turn into ethereal snobs
at twilight. Some say
come live with me and be my
refusal to choose ever.
Some say and we shall
all our pleasures move a little
down the street. They are
wrinkles and popovers.

Sometimes we make the dome into
a frayed quilt observatory
to raise the tentative whip
of recognition, throwing
things in the dumpster
as a way of being together.
The rose of stacked clear
plastic clamshell trays that sifts the light.
“Kiss me for luck.” “Oh
that's my other face.”

(vehicle)

June is a long month
                on the way
to wizened leather nipple
                strawberries.

Tomato flowers are yellow
                flickering,
“Yeah we’re problematic but
                also we’re

the problem.” If the
                tomatoes
never ripen, then what?
                I want all
                                the music,

insurrection, pepper and salt.
                Let thinking
be typical in its
                lapses like

the tides. I want
                to forget
what responsible vehicle ownership
                even is.

Sam Lohmann is a parent, poet, and librarian living in Vancouver, Washington. He is a co-organizer of the long-running Spare Room Reading Series in Portland, and co-publisher of Airfoil Chapbooks with David Abel. He is the author of several books and pamphlets, most recently Poems for Shy Communists (published by Airfoil in 2025). Recent work has appeared online at beautifuldayspress.com (in the Winter 2025 issue of Works & Days) and at relegationbooks.com (in the journal R&R).