I’m an old man now sitting like a movie extra in a blocked-off street faire full of sunscreen tents and outdoor seating, bales of hay imposing safe distance barriers against Covid, reading, as it happens, Salmon Rushdie’s story, “The Old Man in the Piazza.” I’m delighted by the phrase, “the vanity of certainty” a vanity […]
Eugene Berson
Long active in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene, Gene Berson holds an MA in English literature from San Francisco State University. He has taught poetry workshops under the auspices of SFSU's Pegasus Program (which eventually became California Poets in the Schools) in everything from one-room Wyoming schoolhouses to reform schools, Indian reservations, and as a high school teacher in Oakland. Gene is the author of raveling travel (Open Book Press, 2019) and The Work Ethic of the Shopping Cart Shaman (Hip Pocket Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bastard Angel, and others. He worked in the trade show industry (Sign Display Union, Local 510) and was a translator in Korea (7th Infantry Division). Gene grew up in the Bay Area and currently lives in the foothills of Northern California with his wife Ruby.
Rock Tao Review
Rock Tao, 173 pages, published by Lithic Press, 2022, edited by Patrick James Dunagan with an afterword by Marina Lazzara. Rock Tao is a high-spirited and engaging, funny and wise, philosophically and socially astute collage of poetry, song lyric and prose commentary that explores how Rock & Roll set the American musical imagination on fire and […]
The Work Ethic of the Shopping Cart Shaman
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” my grandfather’s neighbor asked me. As I looked up at him, it was hard to make him out. Shadows from the sycamore trees jostled his face so it kept pulling apart and coming together again like a reflection in water. This apparitional aspect disembodied his […]
San Francisco Bay
For nine years I swam in this bay, nearly every day, all hours, all weather, from Alcatraz, across the Golden Gate diving off Fort Mason—always I came out changed, sat in Ghirardelli’s overlooking where I swam drinking a cappuccino on the outside deck, blissful, but sobered by sorrowful calm. I consult, almost scry, […]
Listening to the Neighborhood
I’m at the helm on my back porch totally in charge of nothing but my coffee this Easter morning and the birdseed I’ve scattered for sparrows across the carport roof overlooking the parking lot of the Vietnamese laundromat. There’s a great clamor and excitement a festival feeling in the cool morning air in front […]
San Francisco Bay
For nine years I swam in this bay, nearly every day, all hours, all weather, from Alcatraz, across the Golden Gate diving off Fort Mason—always I came out changed, sat in Ghirardelli’s overlooking where I swam drinking a cappuccino on the outside deck, blissful, but sobered by sorrowful calm. I consult, almost scry, […]
O Romeo . . .
Hand me my armadillo mandolin. I need to sing. Turn on the Transporter Machine to the moment shimmering alongside this one. Somewhere wind is blowing trailing a wake of sunlight through a hillside of spring grass. I see a sailboat leaning thin as a butterfly under a bruised sky, so piercingly white everybody’s stopped on […]
A Kalimba of Weeds
long stemmed dandelions bouncing in the meadow I didn’t notice the bees at first the weight of each one pulling down each stem and letting go one after another a field of springing keys played without sound I heard a melody rise from the field— a death song a feeling spread through me like […]
Spiders
Spiders I’m wasting time just looking at a spider— it helps me to look at them. This one, poised in its web, up side down, below the lamp, black legs tapered to a point self-contained as a cocked hammer seems ready to wait through eternity for its prey. Sometimes, though one waits so long, […]
Thank God for Nietzsche
This book calls out to be a movie. That may sound a little startling to say, given that it’s a biography of a philosopher. But Prideaux places you in Nietzsche’s mind and life so clearly you understand his struggles and drive for truth in personal as well as philosophical, social and historical terms. In fact, […]
C’Mon Back Cafe
It’s 96 degrees iced coffee, early afternoon diligent millennials inside at their laptops I’m outside in the warm shade of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel barely able to breathe. Some of her leaves collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats but she’s hanging in there. How I depend on her! Her […]
March 4
March Fourth. Nothing special, so far as I know. Not one twig, however, is without its sleeve of snow, its miniature skyline. When the sun comes out, clumps softly thud around the house like distant fireworks. And sudden waterfalls of snow splash over the cedar limbs, leaving them dancing and waving. Dirty boulders pile up […]
raveling travel
I recall a scene years ago, in a college biology class, where the instructor was talking about how various life forms came to populate south sea islands separated by wide stretches of ocean. Certain spiders, he said, buoyed by what seemed to me a miraculous confidence, would climb trees, let out a strand of silk […]
The Moon Drew a Feather Across my Bones
for Cleve Jones Movements come in waves and waves come in sets. One certainly predicts another. At the time of the incident the following poem describes I had been working as a trade show worker at Brooks Hall in San Francisco. That particular night I got off around ten, exhausted, and climbed up the concrete […]