Vol. XLVIII, No. 8
August 2024
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THE NOE VALLEY VOICE
Spring Skies: This view from Gold Mine Hill in Diamond Heights is a reminder of the storms that fed our current summer.
hen thoughts are written down, marvelous things can happen. Passing your neighbor on the streets of Noe Valley you might not learn what they’re thinking and of the possible connections present.This edition of The Noe Valley Voice attempts to bridge distances both ordinary and extraordinary. Some of your neighbors call themselves writers and willingly produce lyrical prose. Others, hesitant to adopt a label, email the work their muse has prompted with some hesitance. Like tossing a bottled message in the ocean, your fellow Noe Valeyan hopes for a response.
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Meet Carol Casey, Chana Jacobs, Elise Kazanjian, Barrie Grenell, Dian Wynne, Jan Masaoka, Jessica Anderson, Megan G. Smith, Mimi Mueller, And Renzo BolerMarshall. You’ll hear again from Grace D’Anca, Dale Fehringer, Daniel Murphy, Kit Cameron, Daniel Raskin, Jeff Kaliss, Julie House and Mark Thoma.
Carol Casey’s poetry has been published in the literary magazine of The Catholic University of America and Bay to Ocean journal. Her poem "Shirley and the Gods of Desire" was a finalist in the 2024 Crossroads Poetry Contest.
Photo by Sally Smith
• Carol Casey • Dream from the Other Coast Waking I see snow crowns the cars—still in Baltimore. I’m starting to know I’ll stay a while. More than that, I’ve learned from dreams that knowledge has no power, power’s an illusion. Love is all. And California’s lovely. Salt off the Pacific. Earth’s faults showing through.
How To Make a Beach The glass river invites breaking. Dive and shattered water heals behind you. Swallows flee their pier-y nests, dip and whirl.
Eagles fall upward, from cliffs into high currents.
Wittgenstein’s Lion by the Bay
On the bay, a tugboat chuffs behind a barge, the rusty sound of work carried by water.
You’re aswim in language—the breaking wave a shy lover, who leaves his letter on the shore then runs.
You think you are floating through life. You think, I have made nothing.
Awash in metaphor, you think the steady waves are the visible heartbeat of the bay. Do waves conspire to carve the curving cove?
You stumble out of the river, wet and dripping like some kind of beach B-movie monster. In your wake, a tiny ripple pushes a grain of sand against a pebble.
Try this to understand: Like a tide-tossed naiad, lie down in wet gritty sand, where the rising wave ends in its breaking and the bay washes over the land.