Jerome Berglund

Holding Patterns

I notice the cashier constructs two identical grocery bags packed with matching assortments of diverse items then I think am I obsessive compulsive or have these traits been painstakingly hammered into me at a succession of mechanical service jobs demanding precision and efficiency grace and symmetry ingrained over the course of a tedious public education geared toward churning out compliant factory workers similarly, are tendencies and predilections ever actually inherited passed down hereditarily encoded in genomes or do working class people and idle rich sorts find themselves typically inhabiting identical environments successively which gives rise to the same familiar problems and neuroses generationally? So much of that we’ve been convinced is our own faults or some mystic byproduct of nature and its many soupy material components but truly, I wonder the things we think about standing in lines.

lotto ticket I learn nothing

Discharge

Santa María
I come bearing
trash

Someone once described to me a classmate they’d encountered whose face would be forever scored by a henna of sores she had contracted in the womb.  That always struck me as exceptionally revealing, like she were manifesting something familiar and universal which we as yet could only describe theoretically in the abstract; epigenetics of a peculiar variety.  My uncle is sending Sapolsky videos again, this most recent one on prenatal conditions and intergenerational trauma, perhaps why that memory was flapping around my attic like a restless brown bat disturbing dusty rafters, scratching clawing scraping the insulation.

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, and Modern Haiku. His first full-length collections of poetry Bathtub Poems and Funny Pages were just released by Setu and Meat For Tea press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.