By Karen Douglas

begins with a calendar
an appointment a clock
the moment when
a vehicle vacates its space

a woman fills out forms
sticks labels to paper
leads me to read
out–of–date magazines

test done I wait for news
negative is normal
notice the changing
light of another day

By Thomas Luhrmann

Well–defined pockets of chaos
litter an otherwise uncluttered landscape

and as it recedes the mindless roar of the alien system
is beginning to resemble

an ultraviolet sea fan far more than a silver broach,
a toothpick or some unrepentant swan

Like the collision of two extraordinarily different worlds
that have little in common but a passion for secrecy

we stand before each other naked and unashamed
and for the umpteenth time

the simplicity of the calliope on the ice cream van
takes us back to a more innocent age

when hamburgers frying on a charcoal grill
would partially restore the borderline psychotics

and conditions favoring the algae’s sudden efflorescence
remained a stupefying mystery

By Thomas Luhrmann

Clumps of tall purplish grass are being “harvested”
for want of a better word

the floodlights of the miniature golf course
are the primary source of light pollution here

while the thunder of monkeys scampering over this vast tin roof
echoes throughout the cavernous gloom

Let’s shoot flaming arrows in the general direction of the pond
in whose mirror–like surface the moon does not appear

Let’s update the aircraft painted on the runways
before they are obliterated the way that music turns to dust

For the ice people graze content beneath the myrtle,
the bench people graze content beneath the stars

and the Ficus tree that partially illuminates the vending machine
offers limited immunity from this purifying wind

By Thomas Luhrmann

Extraneous but extraordinarily meaningful events
clog the drains of the summer house in Devonshire

while no atavistic memory of our desert origins
can alleviate the gloom or fill the night with strategies

or is it strawberries and the memory of some terrible defeat
stretching before us like a herd of wildebeest?

The sky is beautiful, the trees are beautiful, the buffalo
yet the people are uniformly and unmistakably hideous

The baby vomits up a miniature horse, a dog and a pig;
how rapidly they disappear into the wallpaper

while the dimly–perceived infrastructure tickles us
with its vague though never fully understood banalities

and the worm at the center of the apple–shaped cloud
imagines she’s the center of our world