GERARD SARNAT - POEMS

Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals (e.g., Universities of Chicago/ Maine/ San Francisco/Toronto, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Penn, Dartmouth, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Baltimore) plus national (e.g., Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Poetry Review, Peauxdunque Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library Literary Journal, South Broadway Press, Parhelion, Clementine, pamplemousse, Red Wheelbarrow, Deluge, Poetry Quarterly, poetica, Tipton Journal, Hypnopomp, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Buddhist Poetry Review, Poets And War, Thank You For Your Service Anthology, Wordpeace, Lowestoft Chronicle,  2020 International Human Rights Art Festival, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Indolent Books, Snapdragon, Pandemonium Press, Boston Literary Magazine, Montana Mouthful, Arkansas Review, Texas Review, San Antonio Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Review, pacificREVIEW, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Fiction Southeast and The New York Times) and international publications (e.g., Review Berlin, London Reader, Voices Israel, Foreign Lit, New Ulster, Oslo Griffel, Transnational, Southbank, Wellington Street Review, Rome Lotus-Eaters). He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate change justice. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters. gerardsarnat.com

FREAK FLAGS AT HALF MAST  ​

Zilch Guarantees haiku

​You’ve been traveling
lots but still have found nada
true enlightenment.

​Up & Down
Or  Cutting
Across Chess
Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can.
 

Just as Technology
has shifted from
being a vertical --
 
organizationally
in a stack above or
below other usual
 
equal silos such as
HR, Finance, Ops,
Sales & Marketing
 
all reporting up
most likely to big
picture CEOs --
 
to worming into a more powerful horizontal fundamental throughout entire enterprises,
 
so has Climate
Change moved
out of its recent
 
confined box
now to clearly
affect almost
 
anything that we
have named as
highest priorities*
 
ranging from
Jobs/ Economy,
to Health Care,
to Education  
 
to Terrorism, SSI, Inequality, Immigration so has become a second controlling horizontal.
 
Food-system
collapse, sea
level rise, sick
 
our good Earth
ruined, we few
drop in on Mars
 
then a couple of
Jovian moons
before set out
to roam stellar
prairies trapped in
dead-end tin cans:
 
Flailing memory, once stars of our past now at half-glimmer soon fade to total darkness.
 
 
*https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/04/state-of-the-union-2019-how-americans-see-major- national-issues/pp_
2019-01-24_political
-priorities_0-02/
​

​Topnotch Peat Smoke haiku

​We met long ago
but just now bond over my
good Scotch, her writing.
 

Small Business Exterminates Family Self-Esteem

​For Passover renewal next week
all our extended clan has agreed
to make climate change the underlying theme.
 
On another quasi-Jewish jag, can our A-team
figure out how we
could glean
 
or buy/ build/ blaspheme
devastating ant bait dropper devices downstream
from their colonies
 
that could be used chronically so every few days I don’t have to re-hydrate/fresh/deem
cotton balls soaked in sugar water plus boric acid which Spring sunbeams
dry out -- instead of Dixie cups, sorta like my hummingbird feeder?