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