 Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, Margie, Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Burningwood Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Tiferet plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast and Tipton Review. “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids and four grandkids so far. gerardsarnat.com Allahu Akbar After last Ash Wednesday happened Valentine's Day woohoo Jeez time flied – guys up in that sky -- JC Pesach sup with bros Good Friday when stock exchanges close as matter of catholic tradition while those original Jewish monotheists’re replaced by Christians then a half millennia later Abraham’s youngest branch begins which now celebrates Sabbath protesting new Eretz Israel Gaza security rules: 16 Muslims dead right before Easter Sunday’s Resurrection occurred on April Fools if gluten-free matzo ain’t gross though non-GMO spelt grain’s worse -- I’m a matzochrist who derives pleasure from the bread of affliction. Technicolor Melee Easter Sunday dawn after Saturday night braised osso bucco, walking on our virginal forest trail with one grandson whose inculcated domain’s primarily nature, as Benjamin Blaze indicates variegated petit four trumpet daffodils opening under a double rainbow, today’s white Pascal lamb trying to be petted while avoid being spayed by narcissistic anti-religulous adults exclaims unfazed, “Let’s get ready for adoration from a little boy trading in his black sheep for Resurrection’s payday.” Passover Divining Rod haiku Samurai hair bun -- chop stick sampling hive honey -- zendo Ouija board Fixin’ To Die Golden Anniversary Rag: 1967-2017In 1969 I married my best friend’s date from two years earlier right before San Francisco’s Summer of Love when he graduated from what we considered “Berkeley” – which is what those idealists who smoked Acapulco Gold and took full advantage of newly-minted birth control pills and went to Winterland plus the Avalon Ballroom to rock out to Quicksilver Messenger Service or Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and The Holding Company or Jefferson Airplane as well as Country Joe and the Fish decrying Vietnam after which, holy mackerel, this Stanford medical student went to the barricades to burn his draft card then almost get brains blown out holding a gun to the head of a Marine driving a bus of recruits to Oakland’s Federal Building -- instead of calling the great northern California university “Cal” which is what the cohort our age who fell on the Silent Generation side of the fence called the same school where they got a world-class classroom education while my best friend and his date educioed the Free Speech Movement we thought was a Jeffersonian democracy silver bullet that had blown the doors off status quo mealy-mouthed bourgeois flatulence but instead simply opened the window a revisionist assassination-bloodied decadent sliver before it closed only to leave us stuck inside Big Brother’s consumer mobile with the Trumpian blues again and again. Bad News Good NewsPerhaps half of the time ApplePay isn’t accepted or does not take plus is often accompanied by disgruntled younger folk in lengthening queues hissing something about you goddamn old folk. Both renewed credit cards that for the last six decades were mailed in such discrete envelopes they got tossed or maybe never arrived but then which finally came with expiration dates now when I’m 50-50 one of those in our 80s. Coy haikuAppleyness fleshes out both ultimate Cezanne* and post coital lulls. *riffing off https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/09/the-lurchingly-uneven-portraits-of-paul-cezanne MOST SIGNIFICANT YEARS OF MY LIFE i. 1960 My (step)dad, although a somewhat legendary member of the Jewish mob and founder of the El Rancho Vegas who died suddenly from a massive heart attack, nonetheless was the only father I knew plus best one since none of Mom’s four subsequent husbands could tie his shoes -- much less fill them. ii. 1967 At first it had to do with Vietnam -- in my dummkopf case just surviving holding a gun to the head of a marine driving a busload of recruits on 880 to the Oakland Induction Center. Earlier that year I’d left intriguing but often alien Victorian Boston. Came back west -- specifically to San Francisco Bay area during the Summer of Love, as it were. Just in the nick to fall on the “forward-looking” rather than silent generation side of the proverbial clichéd fence -- and soon enough fall for the love of my life. She showed how to be human/e and gave me a family that remains our highest priority and source of joy -- along with our share of sadness. This was provoked watching a doc on the making of 1967’s epic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band -- looks of Paul, John and George Martin’s ties; they too could’ve taken frostier paths. Penny For Unsolicited Thoughts My life has intertwined with Berserkeley. Diverting there from Victorian Harvard circa 1963 for virginal toke. Smashing bus headlights on 880 to delay Marine recruits from Vietnam deployment to meeting my wife of 50 years to CEOing HMOs to now burying friends. Lenny Robert Da Bruce Springstein [Sic] Sycophantish Geotrans Abstrusity loopy splat fem punk, desert storm raining sand on Assad’s presumed once defunct dynastic non-monastic Ba’ath reign, Sears Roebuck repair epicenes or O.C.D. M.D. rx’d suppositories help melt blood tipped ISIS turd repository parades. bossanova strong man guru Erdoğan Turkey breast semi-sweet malt kisses Finnish off rest of milk chocolate bar star laddish Kurdish freedom fighter chicks waltzing in my landsman Jew Himalayers’ thinnish air of our muy mucho Syrias despair. this here quaint glossy Kaposi’s lipstick party pic ain’t made into your basic USA 45 caliber cowboy cartridge now housed in a Trump Tower anti-gay museum of rotting earth’s public bootlicker Goldman Sachs Mnuchin’s red tilak dotted pube domain. BONUS HAIKU |
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