Gerard Sarnat
1. Moby’s Perverted Sour Grapes
Our bearded baked bear or drunk whale of a
dick mentor harpooned my new festooned work,
Keep dialects/slang to their bare minimum
IF you must use them here. Nada head-hopping
or POV changes. Oughta revert to Ahab being naked,
preferably with Jezebel, the ancient Tyre king’s fat daughter.
2. While Catching Up On My Medical Reading
i. Hemolacria*
I cried blood entering Colma,
the confounding company town
which was zoned just for burial biz
which is relevant
since we were going there to witness
our friend being put to rest
underground.
On the way, back of a black limo
occupied by loved ones,
I wondered out loud
if there may exist similar villages
where all your births take place
and absolutely everyone’s required
to pour forth tears of pure joy.
*thanks to New England Journal of Medicine, 1NOV18
ii. Burton Lines*
A 39-year-old man is brought to my emergency room
from a local international airport.
He reported feeling very ill after the ingestion
of thirty packs of opium weighing fifty grams each.
The mule admitted this was his fifteenth trip
for a drug cartel which paid good money post delivery.
On inspection, this gent had gray gingival abnormalities
-- the classic sign I read about way back in med school of
chronic poisoning by lead that turned out to contaminate
what was seen on CAT and which eventually passed.
* thanks to New England Journal of Medicine, 8NOV18
iii. Geez, GC’s Come A Long Way In Four Decades.
In 1975, winging it in Marin County’s Point Reyes National Seashore
with my wife and first baby, I did natural childbirth home deliveries
on the back of pickup trucks up in the Russian River
down to hippy communes in San Francisco’s Tenderloin
where blithered acidheads blithely pushed out LSD-blighted detritus.
As a sidelight, before the AIDs epidemic or VD resistance,
I gave highly-effective penicillin shots to Jessie Colin Young,
Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead men when they went on tour.
In 2015, the Obama administration deemed on-the-rise gonorrhea
by far the most common as well as one of the two most urgent
infectious public health threats to national security
because of accelerating emergences of antibiotic unresponsiveness
in these organisms which may soon require new experimental drugs
such as Zoliflodacin (ETX0914), maybe extended hospital stays
plus present $erious burdens to international health care systems.*
Children of our children, take care.
* Neisseria gonorrhoeae — Rising Infection Rates, Dwindling
Treatment Options, New England Journal of Medicine, 8NOV18
Gerard Sarnat is a physician who’s built and staffed homeless and prison clinics as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. He is a member of the longest-running U.S. Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group, and served on New Israel Fund’s International Board. Currently Gerry is devoting his energy and resources to deal with global warming. Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is published in academic-related journals including Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, Arkansas, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Slippery Rock, Appalachian State, Grinnell, American Jewish University and the University of Edinburgh. Gerry’s writing has also appeared widely including recently in such U.S. outlets as Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Circle, Blue Mountain Review, Danse Macabre, Canary Eco, Fiction Southeast, Military Experience and the Arts, Poets And War, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review and The New York Times. Pieces have also been accepted by Chinese, Bangladeshi, Hong Kongese, Singaporian, Canadian, English, Irish, Scotch, Australian, New Zealander, Australasian Writers Association, French, German, Indian, Israeli, Romanian, Swedish and Fijian among other international publications. Mount Analogue selected KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY for pamphlet distribution nationwide on Inauguration Day 2017. Amber Of Memory was chosen for the 50th Harvard reunion Dylan symposium. He’s also authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), and Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids, five grandsons and looking forward to future granddaughters.