MASSACHUSETTS MAN BUYS $395,000 HOUSE DESPITE WARNINGS IT WILL ‘FALL INTO OCEAN’

haibun by Jerome Berglund

with found prose quotations from headlines for the September 11, 2024 Guardian article by Maya Yang.

David Moot…

 

smoking with

the windows up

ball lightning

 

…nabs ‘dream’ Cape Cod home…

 

intelligent 

design 

splitting adam

 

…next to eroding cliff…

 

overcast 

a hot spot 

in the blues

 

…in imminent danger of crumbling…

 

we buy 

neglected properties 

skeleton key

 

“A man who says life’s too short…

 

under 

the rock 

hard fast rules 

 

…to resist buying a home that might fall 

off a cliff in a few years…

 

bible belt 

center 

mass

 

…has taken ownership of a house with a beautiful view…

 

stroke 

of luck 

arching back

 

…of the slowly encroaching ocean.”

 

three fingers 

the trees dropped are removed 

in the night

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Kingfisher, and Presence. His first full-length collections of poetry were released by Setu, Meat For Tea, Mōtus Audāx press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.

ME AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

by CaLokie

Every public school classroom in Louisiana has been ordered to display a poster of the Ten Commandments. This one? Weird.

I come from a Bible Belt State where 
a majority of the people said 
they loved a God who 
they had never seen 
but voted for governors 
and legislators who 
passed Jim Crow laws which 
segregated themselves from 
fellow humans who 
could be seen. 

Now the Bible Belt state of Louisiana 
has passed a law requiring 
the Ten Commandments to be 
displayed in school classrooms despite 
the fact that there is no archeological or 
historical evidence of an exodus of 
a nation of slaves from Egypt led by 
the great emancipator 
and lawgiver, Moses. 

But having said that I have no 
problem with a public display of 
the ten commandments since 
I’m not a sculptor 
and have never made 
any graven image, nor 
any likeness of any thing 
that is in heaven above, nor 
that is in the earth beneath, nor 
that is in the water under the earth.
 
Moreover I have never coveted 
my neighbor’s manservant, nor 
his maidservant, nor 
his ox, nor 
his ass. 

Carl Stilwell (aka CaLokie) is a retired teacher who taught for over 30 years in the Los Angeles Unified school District. He was born during the depression in Oklahoma and came to California in 1959 and has lived there ever since. His pen name was inspired by the Joads’ struggle for survival in The Grapes of Wrath and the songs and life of Woody Guthrie. His poems have been published in Altadena Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, Four Feather’s Press, Lummox, Pearl, Prism, Revolutionary Poets Brigade—Los Angeles, Rise Up, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, and The Sparring Artists.