Roger Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley,  and Stanford Continuing Studies. He has enjoyed being published in a few dozen online and print literary journals and anthologies over the years, including the Ocean State Review, the Magnolia Review and the Bacopa Literary Review. While a student at Berkeley, Sippl was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and was treated for thirteen months with a mixture of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, seriously challenging him in many ways, but allowing him to live relapse-free to this day, forty-three years later. See what he’s been doing at http://www.rogersippl.com.

Poem

HE TAKES CHANCES

In a long slow dance exhausted
shuffling around the room, moving in
a circle, while twisting
with my arms around myself
I hug my baby that is not
there, being watched by the
stuffed animals that waited
for him to be born fourteen and a half years ago.

He is at his six-week-long
“wilderness camp” in our American Siberia
supposedly learning what his life with me
did not transfer to his working brain.

He takes chances.
Good or bad he takes chances.

And he must learn the difference.

He’s broken just the things
I cannot fix
and in his subconscious he’ll fight
the demons that he built
so that he can defeat them on his own.

He takes chances.
Good or bad he takes chances.

And he must learn the difference.

While on his “survival course”
his younger brother and sister will not understand
why he had to live long enough in the ice
to find himself, and then go away
to a therapeutic boarding school
for an infinite eighteen months.

We will have to get them a kitten.

He takes chances.
Good or bad he takes chances.

And he must learn the difference.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Sippl. Used with permission of the author.

David Ruettiger is a retired social worker and costume shop owner who writes something everyday. He spends his time walking Pacifica’s trails, engaging its gorgeous mountains and lands, and especially the incredible ocean. He gardens vigorously and reads voraciously.

Poem on Belonging

PACIFICA

Knit together across six exits
next to the ocean
Pacifica is a beach town
strung along the coast.
Community tides ebb & flow
Old timers proud
of their long time here
New timers excited just to be here
I’m an in betweener
As this place still feels new
In spite of a decade of residence.
Walk any of the hill trails
Or stroll along any of the beaches
Your jaw is bound to drop in awe
Your lips will curl upward in a smile.

Copyright © 2019 by David Ruettiger. This poem originally appeared in Speak Poetry Vol. 1. Used with permission of the author.

Appointed Pacifica Poet Laureate from 2014-2017, Dorsetta Hale launched the “Poems on the Devil’s Slide Ride” program featuring printed poems by selected Bay Area poets, in partnership with the City of Pacifica, Pacifica Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center and the San Mateo County Transportation Authority. She wrote and read her poetry for CORA (Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse) for their various events, and provided presentations throughout the community, including schools, libraries and events. Dorsetta featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Reading co-hosted by the San Mateo County Poets Laureate, San Mateo County Arts Commission, and the San Mateo County Libraries.

Poem on Belonging

KEYBOARD PLAYERS

My sugar man
turns raw
golden brown
when the sun
shines hot
Hair
dark as my skin
I miss his thin lips
whenever he grins

Forgive me forefathers
I knew not what to do
I didn’t see his color
when he said the words
I love you

Copyright © 2022 by Dorsetta Hale. Used with permission of the author.

Poet Laureate Project

Appointed by the Council of the City of Pacifica, Dorsetta Hale served as Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2017.

Dorsetta’s community project, “Poems on the Devil’s Slide Ride,” featured printed poems by selected Bay Area poets, in partnership with the City of Pacifica, Pacifica Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center, and the San Mateo County Transportation Authority.

Jacki Rigoni is the author of Seven Skirts from Paloma Press. She lives with her three children in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as Poet Laureate of Belmont, California from 2018 to 2021. She has a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a credentialed teacher. A finalist for the 2018 Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, her poems appear in Nimrod International Journal, Moon City Review, Migozine, anthologies, and permanent public art installations. Jacki writes on her site WomanUprising.com and facilitates courses for women at WomanU.com.

Poem on Belonging

LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

Behind beachsand bricks,
beside the corner downspout,
I stood honor guard
in the ceremony of the peonies.

In an aura of soon-summer,
scented rose-ish and curly,
Mom clipped
fat blush blooms
with their frantic black ants,
wrapped them
in damp paper towels
and tin foil,
presented them
to my almost-second-grade hands,
before the first
come out, come out
wherever you are,

when playdate
wasn’t yet a word,
but an unscheduled world
on the other side
of a doorbell,
teeming with neighbor kids,
sprinklers and crayfish,
caterpillars, dirty feet, scabs,
whiffle ball, black-eyed susans,
Queen Anne’s lace,

until barbecued chicken
or bug spray or bedtime
called for us, one by one,
wild entourage of the peonies.

Copyright © 2019 by Jacki Rigoni. Used with permission of the author.

Find Jacki’s books in the library!

Seven Skirts (2021)

Poet Laureate Projects

Appointed by the Council of the City of Belmont in 2018, Jacki Rigoni served as Belmont Poet Laureate through 2021.

Curator, Belmont Poetry Night reading series and open mic

Founder, “Poetry Walk” in collaboration with Belmont Parks & Recreation and Friends of the Belmont Library, an installation of permanent poetry signs featuring past and present poets laureate

Founder, “Holiday Poetry & Caroling”

Curator, “19 Women Poets on the Centennial of the 19th Amendment,” where 19 poets added a line to a 19th Amendment crowdsourced poem.

Poet and recovering engineer Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics, winner of the Red Mountain Poetry Prize. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, MOSAIC America Fellowship, and Djerassi Residency, she served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and is a frequent speaker on the confluence of arts and sciences. Her work appears in journals and anthologies including POETRY, The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, Ruminate, The London Reader, The Curator, and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology.

Poem on Belonging

LESSONS (from “FLIGHT”)

I was born an eldest son.
Before I could read
my apprenticeship began

in crafting, by machine
and by hand, the tools
of flight. Engines tended,

tuned like bells across
my father’s workshop.
When I was ten we cut

the first long ribs
for his first real airplane.
By its completion I had

breasts and soft hips.
The fuselage wore fine spruce,
the wings fleshed out

over rods and spars
and they weighed on me.
I helped to rig them,

to stitch and smooth
a skin of faultless silk
as all around us

notes of solder and epoxy,
of lanolin and gasoline
infused our hair, our clothes,

and settled on the spines
of metal parts in bins.
I chose to follow him.

Flying the middle course.
Setting out. And fearing—
not the frailty of mechanisms,

but an old fear
of failing. Of everything
except the spectacle of Earth

above my head, and sky
below, inverted by
my own hand at the yoke.

Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Rosenberg. This poem originally appeared in A Different Physics (Red Mountain Press). Used with permission of the author.

Find Lisa’s books in the library!

A Different Physics (2018)

Poet Laureate Projects

Appointed by the County of San Mateo Board of Supervisors, Lisa Rosenberg served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County from January 2017 through December 2018. Projects include:

First Tuesday Poets Night, a monthly community poetry event, normally held at Café Zoë in Menlo Park, currently meeting online.

Spoken Art (2017-2018), a county-wide ekphrastic challenge that showcased local artwork in several media which received hundreds of original poems from writers of all ages.

SUMMARY OF ARTWORK

“A quick stop in any coastside or bayside gallery gives us a hint of the amazing array of artists we have in San Mateo County. It struck me that an ekphrastic project would be a great way to include visual artists in my charter of increasing opportunities for county residents to create and share poetry.”

Lisa Rosenberg

Diquan Richard is a Bay Area Native who is currently getting his master’s in Education, Equity and Social Justice at San Francisco State University. Since the age of 13, Diquan has always had a passion to express himself creatively through his art, music, poetry, and his global humanitarian work. He has dreams of gaining employment at Pixar Animation Studios as a computer animator. 

Poem on Belonging

CAN YOU BE LOVED?

Can you love
me even though
I’m different?

Can you see past
my imperfections
no matter how
displeasing they
may be?

Can you love
yourself enough
to know that I
Love you for who
You are and not
what you look like?

Can You Be Loved?

Copyright © 2020 by Diquan Richard. Used with permission of the author.

Carol Park grew up in Redwood City, and though her specific jobs have ranged, they’ve always included words, teaching and nurturing of people. Six of her adult life took place in Japan where she mothered two young children, taught ESL, and learned much from Japanese friends. After the kids grew up, she earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific and devoted time to fiction and poetry. Find her poems in SLANT, Minerva Rising, Black Fox Literary Review, and several anthologies. She’s currently finishing a novel set in Tokyo. Read her fiction at carolpark.us.

Poem on Belonging

OF OKLAHOMA AND BAVARIA

My parents were born to farmers. 
My mom’s sole toy a ball
in Delhi, Oklahoma. She picked cotton
along with her mother and brothers.
Her father, postman and preacher, rode in 1919 
and never returned. Probably crossing a river or
the epidemic of flu overwhelmed him.

Mom’s parents sharecropped. Dad’s folks
owned their land. Still, snow lay atop his bed
of a morning—that’s what he often said—
and told of trekking to school with a hole in his shoe.
He looked to education for his salvation.
WWII took the young couple east. Later they went west.
Visalia, California, my birthplace, but, from year two to 
eighteen, in Redwood City was my school and play.
Dad taught at Cañada college. On days off,
he mowed the lawn, pruned trees
or harvested plums & apricots. I picked the fallen,
and cut fruit for canning for Mom. Weekly I scrubbed
the kitchen floor on my knees. I got a quarter!

A hose for the car, broom for the porch, vacuuming 
twice a week, changing sheets weekly—cleaning 
an all-day, mother and daughters, Saturday occupation. 
Some fastidious ways I’ve kept, others I’ve dropped.
Family fun back then? Swimming, camping, or kin.
Dining out, fast food or movies rare treats. Trips 
to grandfolks in LA many a time—Disneyland once. 
But I smiled big when Grandpa danced the jig.

Just past thirty, I kissed and wed a Honolulu man 
(Korean descent). Teaching my passion, tech my man’s. 
Scent of cookies & bread enlivened our home—like mom’s—
and nurture of apricots, camelias and geraniums.
My husband and I played Uno with our kids. We four ran
from waves oceanside & walked under oaks. Dipped in
Yosemite’s rivers and hiked its granite mountains. 
Kids gone, I traveled to where window sills
boast boxes of geraniums, colored garnet and rose. 
Bavaria!

German names ripe on my family tree. Six generations ago 
my kin wagered on more land & liberty, and boarded boats 
to a new continent. Muller, Blumb, Zwerger, and Jager—
forebearers to my Yaeger. I searched the German south
for tiny Apfeldorf—there! 
Scratched on a tombstone Muller, a familial name. 
Did a kinsman here write stories, or of fears and aches?

Like what I found in Bavaria, my parents kept pristine yards
but they decried the amber fizz in stein or tall glass—
teetotalers of Baptist persuasion.
Me? I’ve slid to Episcopalian liberalities.

I explored the castle that King Ludwig of Bavaria built, 
and found his son Crown Prince Rupert infuriated Hitler, 
The aspiring demagogue promised restoration of Bavarian monarchy
through his Munich Beer Hall Coup. Rupert refused 
such kingship. Illicit force he rejected. Police put down 
stormtroopers and Hitler went to prison—out a year later.
Rupert named him insane and strived to halt
the conniver’s ascendance. In a decade plus though 
Hitler’s powers grew large, and he seized Rupert’s house.
He escaped to Italy. Did Florentines grow 
geraniums? Blooms of endurance and hope?
Rupert died at age 75, a match to the year I was born.

My kin of the Golden State embrace lies
and vote for demagogue politics.
Who parts from their ancestry?
Not me. 
When I waved adieu to the family camp,
new and kinder kin came round me. Now
in light as warm as Bavarian summer,
I tend geraniums & trees
and honor Rupert.

Copyright © 2022 by Carol Park. Used with permission of the author.

Dina Klarisse (she/her) is a writer, poet, editor, and serial procrastinator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Poetry is her way of making sense of her experience as a queer Filipina American immigrant and recovering Catholic, as well as her interest in the intersections of history, language, culture, and identity. Her work has been published in ASU’s Canyon Voices, The Daily Drunk Mag, Chopsticks Alley, and Kalopsia Literary Journal, among others. She serves as Poetry & Issue Editor for the online literary magazine Marías at Sampaguitas, as well as Editorial Director for the indie micropress, Sampaguita Press. Her debut chapbook, Handspun Rosaries, was released in 2022. 

Poem on Belonging

INGAT

Ingat
sings the chorus
at the very edge of security check,
as close as can be to their travelers.
Mothers and children and co-nurses
wiping tears as a loved one slips away
across the glass barrier to another place.

Ingat
my mother tells me, Take care,
since I was old enough to listen.
And in the white-hot rage of youth I shook it off,
for to take care meant to take what was handed
and given and forced onto me from my first breath:

A forever tether to the voice and arms that held me,
from which I tried to run in search of freedom.

And it was my first act of independence
to forget their ingat and live outside
the safety and restrictions,
brimming over with expectations
of who I should be and should have been.

And in running and hiding I forgot to check
the corners of ingat, wherein hides love and safety:

A calling to travelers that their home is still home,
despite the neon lights of that world out there.

My eyes grew weary of the neon lights and I turned
back to that place that still echoes their calls.

I didn’t seem to notice that I am an object in orbit,
still tethered but now distanced from what is always
and has always been home.

And like a roundtrip ticket I grasp to gravity,
the pull that keeps me in their sight, still far
but close enough to hear.

I find myself saying it back, calling out
to the chorus at the center of it all.

Ingat, I sing in harmony, to my mother and father
and brothers and cousins and aunties and uncles:

The concentric circles tethered
by a prayer or mantra or shout to the void

to take care, and to come back one day.

Copyright © 2021 by Dina Klarisse. This poem originally appeared in Marías at Sampaguitas Magazine Issue No. 2. Used with permission of the author.

Roberta Gonzales-Gregg is a Southern California native and Bay Area transplant of 28 years. She is a Co-Host/Co-Producer at Outlook Video, an LGBTQ public access cable TV show. She is also a Senior Peer Counselor at Peninsula Family Service, and Group Facilitator for “Let’s Talk” Zoom Chat. An avid walker/hiker, she discovered writing poems in her senior years of which two have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Poem on Belonging

ELDER WISDOM

Is it true that we become wise as we get older?
That it is we Seniors who must offer a shoulder?
A shoulder to lean on when challenged in life,
A few words of wisdom to handle the strife?

It’s often I find that yes, I am aging, but continue in learning,
And finding conditions of life which keep me yearning.
Yearning to know NOW what lies ahead and beyond,
To embrace the joys of that which I am fond.
But also to remember and acknowledge
Those who came before me, to glean from THEIR knowledge.

Our ancestors traveled through hardships into the unknown,
To build community, though no blueprints were shown!
They used the wisdom handed down
From their Elders to Youngers
They persevered and stayed strong.

I am now in deep, pensive thought,
And pray that this passed-on knowledge isn’t for naught.
For as I age, I hope never to fear
That this acquired knowledge and love
Will always be held ever-so-dear.

Copyright © 2022 by Roberta Gonzales-Gregg. Used with permission of the author.

Civic Engagement

Senior Peer Counselor & Group Facilitator at the Peninsula Family Service, an organization founded in 1950 which provides comprehensive services that support individuals and families at various stages of life.