Berkeley Noir

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This is not Oakland. This is a swing-shift sistah on the 51B moving from Rockridge, down College Avenue and Telegraph, to let Thursday night meet Friday afternoon / this is a song of ritual and tradition sung soft and hard by a downtown with two mouths / one that chews and one that swallows.

Is it pretentious to claim that a Bay Area college town can be a breeding ground for noir? For that certain kind of shadow and light, but mostly shadow? Where’s the noir in that perfect view of the Golden Gate, cutting-edge lettuces served in a ghetto dubbed “gourmet,” the parking lot with reserved spaces for Nobel Laureates?

This place is red wine and beer spilling over pepperoni cheese pizza and late-night final exams living on the edge of every new beginning. This is a bullet on a cloud dancing around the Berkeley Marina, or a week of wet kisses and PhD applications, love poems, and broken promises on the page / a slice of the pie for everyone running with the promise of chutney, chopsticks, toothpicks, and bottles of Tabasco dangling from preconceived notions of a city that wiggles itself between hot and spicy / get-down or takeout.

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