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photo pxfuel/Creative Commons 1.0

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North Beach Offering

I will accept this one day. I won’t have a choice.
The way I spent my time in San Francisco not finding
the Saint John Coltrane Church,
but staring for hours into the hatched face of Paul Klee’s
Stachel, der Clown. I took coffee at Vesuvio’s
and Irish beers there too,
while across the alley every phoneme
of every mad word riding my bloodstream
gathered dust and gestured to the rough hands
of men older even than my father.
We offered what we could to North Beach
and dined with one hundred librarians,
butter caked on their croissants
and the little white plates of the cafe
were chipped pedestals
where the late afternoon
discarded the sun.
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Kristofer Collins is the publisher of Low Ghost Press and the books editor at Pittsburgh Magazine. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their son Cassidy. His latest collection “The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems” was published in 2020 by Kung Fu Treachery Press. 

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“Saint John Coltrane -A Love Supreme”)  A BBC Documentary

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