GAS Featured Poet: Jerome Berglund

 

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Circle of Salt, and Presence.

Job application

if the 

answer is three 

I’d like 

to know what 

we’re adding up

making light

leaflets blow through 

narrow lane

if all of them 

aren’t participating none 

haven’t been 

aware and

condoning

copper mining 

in dead of night strips 

the school bare

no one 

knows about this stuff or cares 

about this stuff 

or cares to know 

about this stuff

fishnet stockings 

social media 

history 

ethics course — 

curious how many prestigious 

moral relativists 

argue passionately 

in defense of diets

red 

building 

pig farming

behind 

the nineteenth 

hole 

pinochle 

championship

art history 

opening papaya

with a machete 

are some 

nice pigs 

so long as 

they’re stuffed 

on corpses

THE traffiCkingALL 

IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE 

of representatives

of initiation: pizza 

the seventh room 

of Prince Prospero's abbey 

lit a 

deep red

business 

as usual 

massacre of the innocents

revelation 

of the method 

we too 

can guide them gradually 

to the coup de grâce

scooping poop 

when you have a sense of smell

sleeper car

Trump has been arrested! 

. . . breaking news from 

the liberal 

a.i. deep fake wish 

fulfillment teleplays

tree frogs

all the people

hurting

if I hear 

the expression blood libel 

or satanic panic 

ever 

again

a shepherd 

is not aggressive …but it’s 

defensive as f***

mine shaft 

it would be great if no one ever used 

the term conspiracy theorist 

disparagingly 

ever again 

this america 

they may snatch 

and eat me 

2

Moonlight Mushroom

If you need more support for redistribution, reeducation, decentralized power structures, transparency and accountability, here are some snuff films, human experimentation, biowarfare for purposes of population control, racialized eugenics initiatives and demonstrable caste hierarchies, widespread compromise of communications systems and educational materials, affluent people being genuinely vampiric specifically from the poorest most vulnerable populations, assassinations of beloved national treasures, suppressing of treatments and cures for the purposes of profit and to reduce specific demographics, indications of massive false flag operations resulting in enormous loss of life. Hope this will help you swing voters still on the fence. 

quite a storm 

out there

initiated mambo

3

New York Times 

I feel like these AI detection tools are the next Theranos miniLabs. Inconvenient picture of you surfaces in flagrante sacrificio, perhaps after failing to instigate world war three? Clearly a deep state deep fake fake news a.i. parody must be, trouble yourself not our totally trustworthy a.i. tool has a "very high" degree of confidence.

holy cloth

— hey Raefipour, our realtor 

found a map

GAS Featured Poet: Ma Yongbo

 

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Low.

Revolving Door

 

Those who rise early in the morning

are the obverse and reverse of all things,

the tremor between two poles,

the days gone by and the body yet to come,

language lying in the tomb of the mouth,

the perspective that unites Babel, brick kilns and Ferris wheels as one.

 

He hurls a lone spear toward the wall,

and he himself is that trembling wall，

both the child upon the altar and the ram,

the traveler on the train with his back to the forward track,

holding up a mirror to search for his own shadow.

 

Forever turning a windmill of glass blades,

he fuses Hamlet’s hesitant contemplation

with Don Quixote’s reckless deeds,

unites Don Juan’s flesh and Ophelia’s madness into a single whole.

 

He is self-fertilizing pollen and quantum entanglement among stars,

Escher’s Red Ants, water flowing upstream,

monks treading downward, the Möbius strip,

a multidimensional creature reaching straight

to the sphere’s core without crossing its surface.

 

He is the still point of time, the alchemist

and his earnest formula, the spear turned away from death,

drawing a perfect circle, a cross suspended midair,

the spiral stairway Yeats climbed daily toward the Black Tower,

the converging point of two spinning cones moving toward each other.

 

He is the anti-romantic son who gives birth to his own father,

the unmoving flying arrow, the one wrestling with the invisible till dawn

whoever he strikes down, he becomes him;

then raises a ladder to heaven upon solid rock,

this is the final struggle, and also the last supper.

GAS Featured Poet: Iwan Setiawan

Iwan Setiawan was born in Kotabumi, North Lampung, on 23 August 1980. He has pursued the path of poetry with a Sufistic and melancholic sensibility. His poems move through silent territories between divine love, loss, and inner contemplation. His work has appeared in various online and print media, often blending lyrical and symbolic language with meaningful silences, making poetry not merely an expression but a space for contemplation.

Iwan Setiawan is the author of the poetry collection Sang Pencari Cinta (The Seeker of Love), as well as Kitab Puisi Melankolia (The Book of Melancholy Poems), co-written with Silvia Ikhsan. In 2017, he received the Littera Magazine Literary Award. 

THE PRAYER THAT EATS ITS OWN SHADOW

I walk into God

like a wound forgetting its blood

the night teaches me a new alphabet

where silence is the only vowel

my name rots gently in Your mouth

I do not resist

I become the hunger You never confess

angels turn their faces away

not from sin

but from how deeply I kneel

faith is an animal

licking its own shadow

until darkness says amen

West sumatera, 2026

LESSON FROM A DEAD SAINT

the saint died

still holding Your silence

between his ribs

they said he was holy

but holiness is only

how long one survives without answers

I pressed my ear to his chest

heard worms chanting

the most honest prayer

teach me this decay

teach me to disappear

without leaving heaven homeless

West sumatera, 2026

GOD WRITES ME AS A MISTAKE

You write my life

with a trembling hand

ink made of doubt

every breath crosses out

the sentence before it

I am revised by suffering

do not correct me

let me remain wrong

inside Your book

because even errors

are a way

of being remembered

West sumatera, 2026

THE MIRROR WHERE GOD REFUSES TO APPEAR

I break every mirror

yet You remain

breathing behind my eyes

the heart is a ruined mosque

no door

no direction

only dust reciting dust

I pray with borrowed bones

my soul trembling

like a candle afraid of light

if You are not here

why does absence bleed

why does nothing

know my name

West sumatera, 2026

THE BODY THAT FORGOT HOW TO BELIEVE

My body kneels

Before my faith understands why

Bones argue with prayer

Blood hesitates at the word God

I fast from certainty

Drink only doubt

Until hunger becomes a teacher

Inside my chest

A ruined altar breathes

Asking nothing

Yet taking everything

If belief returns

Let it come wounded

Let it limp

So I know it is real

West sumatera, 2026

I TRIED TO LEAVE GOD UNFINISHED

I tried to leave You unfinished

Like a sentence without mercy

But every silence chased me

Wearing Your face

I hid inside sleep

Inside flesh

Inside the future

Yet You kept happening

Now I sit among the ruins

Holding what is left of my name

If this is union

Let it hurt

If this is loss

Let it be Yours

West sumatera, 2026